If you notice, the forum now has much awesome searching. Much love to Sphinx, our search engine, and Chronic, the natural language date parser. Since a search query isn’t required, you can easily look at all of reidman’s posts in the past week. I’m not 100% happy with the search interface. I can’t decide if I want to have a complicated search page like normal a forum that has a heavy page weight, a variable attribute selector like on Leopard’s Finder search or Mail.app’s Mail Rule’s screen, or having a Google style single bar that pro-users can type what meta-data to search by.

I still have a huge laundry list of big ticket items before I start work on the main site or do minor forum bugs: (View them after the jump.)

• Email notifications. I have subscribed topics and PMs on the list, did you want anything else?
• Attachments. I realize you can’t delete them, the whole system needs a rewrite. Allow attachments in PMs.
• Complete PM overhaul. Right now it’s just a simple message displayer. It doesn’t even have folders. D:

Well to recap what’s happened since April(!), we launched the new forum without too terribly much of a hitch. There’s been a few hiccups along the way, things not working after caching issues, Passenger issues (which, thankfully, have been fixed with the later versions), Textile issues, logins ’sticking’ instead of forcing people to logout, and login issues with the main site. While my list shrinks, there’s still more to do!

After the jump, I explain the upcoming future for the main site.

The main site’s going to get an evolution. (Perhaps, as one might say, a Pokévolution.) Reid’s busy with like a billion other things. In addition to some of the awesome stuff he’s going to debut real soon, he’s still doing some freelance stuff to eat. (Ruby needs food too!) So the new *layout* might not happen in awhile. Instead I’m going to ninja-move the main site.

One day, the main site’s going to run on the new code in the background, but it’ll still look the same. Not only will I not bug Reid with “GIMME CSS NOW! GIMME CSS NOW! GIMME CSS NOW!”, it’ll provide a nice foundation for him to work on. You guys will benefit from having a real search engine on the site’s submissions as well as other fancy toys that are being planned?

So what can you do now? The best thing you can do is continue to find bugs on the forum. I still keep an eye out on the Bugs and Features forum. Even if I don’t get to you, the bug will still be on my list of things to do. You may have to fight me for some features since I really don’t like add special preferences that only two people will use, or added random links that significantly clutter the page. I’m trying to keep things clean and simple. (It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t fight though! Keep up the good fight and stuff!)

Hopefully I’ll update the blog more often.

Originally I wanted to release it last weekend as more of a preview build, to show off to you guys and bug test. However, now that we’ve slipped beta release a few times now, Reid and I want to have the forum completely and totally polished when we show off to you guys. See you guys next week!

While we’re at it, we’re announcing the Smilie Contest. When trying to find a royalty-free set of smilies, we came up with the idea of letting our users design our next set of smilies. We’ve been paying attention, and really like some of the stuff in the Smilie topic. We’ve been designing this for awhile, and we got to thinking: What if the winner releases their Smilie set into the Creative Commons? That way, a whole lot of other cool developers can use it too! :D

First here is a screenshot of the front page. We got a lot information on this page. As you can see, we have the forum spy on the right, but also latest posts below the forum as well. You can expand or collapse any forum or category as you wish. You can’t see it here, but the subscriptions show updates to your favorite posts in the same manner as well!

As you can see from this screenshot, there’s more information on the bottom, displaying the top 3 posts by voting or by views. On the right is the topic listing page. You can see some of the cool things we’ve added here. There’s a search which isn’t working right now, but we’re on it! At the top is what I’d like to call the perennial sticky topics. Things like birthdays, the location project, or YouTube videos topic. That way, the stuff that’s normally there can be on the tabs and truly important stuff can be stickied! (You can also see that stickied topics are a little brighter and locked topics are darker.)

Onwards to the posts page! Here at the top, you can see what happens when you do an action. Successes are green and nasty errors are in red. It’s right there at the top of a page when you do something like vote on a topic. (I like to call it thumbing since it’s a thumbs up or thumbs down. :D) You can also see the big and fancy pages too! On the right is farther down the posts page. You can see special icons for some of things you might do, for example, thumbing up or quoting. As you can see some of them aren’t done, but Reid’s going to work on the rest of the icons tonight. Farther down is where you can make a reply, just type stuff in and you’re good to go! I’m debating whether or not stay with FCKEditor or use something like TinyMCE. Both have basic BBCode implementations I can hack to support full matocode, the problem is making things similar to the old ways and not messing up matocode in the WYSIWYG mode.

I’m sorry for not having a beta test sooner. We’re trying to work out all the basic bugs and get things to look similar to what it should be before we let you break things. ;) Keep your eye on the Fangamer blog for more new information!

I don’t want to make any promises, but eventually there’s going to be a beta test soon. I’m hoping that by mid-March the forum will be complete and we could start working on the main site part which should be more or less a breeze since it’s mostly pages, heh. I want to aim for a May switchover for Starmen.Net and an early June for the rest of Fangamer.

Also, keep an eye out on #eb. I’ve been known to go in and offer pre-alpha tests at various points in time.

• I got some mockups done
• Started work on the XHTML/CSS
• Ryan has made TONS of progress on the forum

Again, we’ve got some more banners to show first!

• 
  forteshadow
• 
  hawaiian
• 
  Klobber

I think I’m finally going to get caught up on Banner Contest entries (of which I’ve posted another 12). There are 30 more in the queue, and the vast majority of them are seconds or thirds entries. Don’t be afraid to send yours in if you’ve made one, though!

Design

A few weeks ago, Ryan was kind enough to post the latest forum designs. As you can see, things were going pretty well on that front, but they hit a snag at the beginning of this month as my computer ground itself to a screeching halt.

I’m sure I complained about the limitations of my old Macbook before, but by the end of January it was causing me enough grief that I went ahead and ordered a new Macbook Pro off of eBay (for a super-insanely-good price). There’s a long backstory, but in the end I got my new computer and it works great. It’s super nice to be able to open Photoshop without any ‘Disk Full’ errors, and the speed boost sure doesn’t hurt either.

Development

Since I’ve got the three most ‘important’ mockups done I’ll be focusing mostly on the XHTML/CSS for now. I should actually have a preliminary preview ready soon, since I’ve made a lot of progress this week.

Like I said, I’m not super-familiar with the programming Ryan has done yet, but I do know that he’s done tons of work on the forum and that it’s already got most of its functionality in place. How awesome is that? There’s plenty of work yet to do, but superkudos to him for being all uppity in that thang’s face.

I’ll leave it up to him to explain the details, since he’s got a better handle of it…I’m still off in my own world working on the design/interface.

Update: I thought I had posted this yesterday, but apparently not! I’ll use this opportunity to commemorate my brilliant grasp of technology:

• Got a new computer (I can Photoshop again!)
• Got a loan for Fangamer
• Got a handful of investors/owners

There’s a lot more, but this is already a huge post, so I’m actually going to split it up into two updates and post the second half tomorrow. Before I jump into the details: the Banner Contest strikes back with another big update! Here are three of the 12 new entries:

• 
  mistycat85
• 
  Mr. Spoon
• 
  notalentjew

I’ve still got Banner Contest submissions coming in from time to time, so if you’ve got an idea (or a finished entry), feel free to send it my way. I’m running out of ‘firsts’, meaning that if you submitted multiple banners, I’ll probably start posting your second/third entries soon.

Busyness

Since it’s been a long time since my last update, I’ll quickly explain why things might seem to be moving slow. I’m a freelancer, and if you know anyone who works for themselves in the creative field, I guarantee they’ll tell you that its a “feast or famine” deal. That’s definitely true, and when I started working on Fangamer in November I was headed into a famine.

After I got back from Christmas in January, however, the feast began whether I wanted it or not. I began spending a few hours a week helping out with ADMAX Digital, a local “digital signage” company. I’ve been working with sarencele and Plo to rebuild the company’s digital signage network from scratch on an open source platform. It’s sucked up a lot more of my time than I expected (especially in the last week), but we relaunched a portion of the network yesterday and it’s all gone smoothly, so I’m slowly turning my focus back to Fangamer.

In addition to the part-time work I was doing on ADMAX, I’ve been getting lots of requests for website design work. I’ve found that roughly 1 in 6 website requests turns into an actual contract, so I’ve been pursuing all of them under the assumption that one or two will hit. Unfortunately, even just pursuing these things sucks up a lot of time, so I’ve resolved to stop accepting requests and start kicking them to some of my other design buddies.

The final time-sucker for me has been the process of finishing up all of my obligations to my clients from last year. With the completion of Will Lavender’s site (and a pseudo-launch of Mercury Radio Theater), I’m caught up!

Enough excuses about time — here’s what we have gotten done in the past two months:

Money

February has, without a doubt, been the month of money:

• Paid Ryan for his first month of work
• Paid the lawyer to get started on Fangamer’s Operating Agreement
• Got a large enough loan to finance Fangamer through the end of spring
• Got a handful of investors whose investments should keep us running through late summer.

It feels incredibly wonderfully fantastically good to have that loan (and a lot of the investor stuff) taken care of. By the way, I want to mention that I got the loan through Prosper, and aside from their really horrendous user interaction design, it was pretty freaking cool. It feels good to be subverting the bank who, when I inquired about a loan, suggested that I put it all on credit cards.

There’s a lot more non-business-related progress we’ve made in the past month, but I’ll save that for next update.

First of all I’d like to mention the The Shining Wonderful Ruby Challenge. We’re still interested in Ruby on Rails coders. Check out the forum for more information!

Big Ideas

AJAXy Javascript

One of the key cornerstones I’d like to implement, is a huge Javascript base never seen in a forum. Some forums have AJAXy quick posts, but I want to Javascript the whole thing. Why? Most people have a very powerful computer that can handle data quickly enough. The server generally is split 50/50 to load a page: grabbing data and rendering the HTML. If Javascript asks for the raw data and you render the page, that’s half the work on the website offloaded on to you!

Search

Search is back again. The old method got really, really heavy on memory and slowed down the forums. (Even some basic page loading slows the forum down. :/) The good news is that with the offloaded rendering, we can spend more time on the basics.

Caching

Most giant websites like Slashdot or Digg utilize a proper caching system instead of pulling data out of the database. The database, while quick, is not speedy enough to handle every request uniquely, as I’m sure you’ve seen on our forum. Caching elements speeds up the page such that it loads in an instant. A perfectly cached page doesn’t even hit the database, which is good news for our poor overloaded server.

iPhones and other Mobile Browsers

Webkit, the browser software used both in the iPhone and Safari, is going to be huge. Not only is it used on the iPhone and iPod Touch, but it’s now used in the Wifi enabled Archos, and it’s also going to be used in Google’s Android phones. I plan on taking advantage of this technology. As some of you know, browsing the forum on the iPhone is a big pain in the butt that will be easily fixed. (No more trying to find the [ key!)

Customizable CSS

Reid and I want to make the website fully customizable by allowing you to upload your own CSS file. Take a look at CSS Zen Garden. With the exact same HTML, you can load completely different looking pages, so we plan to offer this feature to our designy crowd.

And for those of you who just want to change fonts and/or colors, we’re going to offer a simple page that will easily change those.

Design

Reid has finished the Topic and Posts page mockups. Feast your eyes upon them!

Feel free to leave comments about them! We’re looking for constructive criticism about the layouts.

• 
  hawaiian
• 
  LitoNico
• 
  Zip Code Ness
  

Development Progress

A few days (or maybe a week) ago, Ryan and I finally sat down and really began hammering out a plan for how development stuff is going to work out. We’re signed up with Springloops for managing our SVN repository, and sarsie has been getting a simple svn hosting solution set up for our volunteer developers in the meantime. Ryan showed me a preview of the forum software earlier today, it seems to be going really well :D

Speaking of volunteer devs, we’re getting ready to start posting projects, but things are going a bit slow due to how busy I’ve been recently with personal stuff and ‘leftover’ freelance projects. I’ve got big plans for the real Sprite DB app, though, so hopefully one of the volunteers is enjoying their work on the SWRC enough to continue it.

Upcoming Design Opportunities?

HD vs PS

Design stuff is going…kinda well. I mean, I’ve got lots of ideas, but it’s going really freaking slow because my hard drive is packed to the gills and Photoshop wants to use 5+ gb just for my forum design alone. I use a lot of nested folders and smart objects…I’m realizing that while it’s a nice way to save time and disk space, it comes back to bite you on the scratch drive, so I’ve started deleting old project files to free up some room.

Once I get a new hard drive (or a new laptop, who knows) I’ll really get going, and I may be cutting another facet into this project: a volunteer design force to help me with ideas and concepts for the Fangamer mockups. I’m thinking about posting my .psd files for anyone to mess around with and make design suggestions, and perhaps bringing the people with super good ideas on board to help out with the hundreds of miscellaneous design tasks we’re going to encounter over the next 5 months.

Back to sleep for now… hopefully I’ll be spending a lot of time on Fangamer stuff tomorrow. Keep on rocking for the kids.