No, really, I'm making progress on the forum app!

I just got back from a week long vacation in Orlando. Had a good time, though I'm a little exhausted. Even for a theme park dork like me, six days is over-doing it.

Before I left, I felt like I finally hit a fair number of milestones for the next version of POP Forums. It seems almost absurd to talk about it anymore since I've been doing so for, uh, three years now. I essentially started over in October, and things really started to flow pretty quickly at that point. Back in August I also thought a lot about what I would do with it outside of my own projects, and I think I've settled on "License it inexpensively, with source code, on the honor system."

There are some basic things to work out, and the next major milestone is to implement a search mechanism, which I prototyped more than a year ago. My goal is to get that done before the end of the month, and then shift gears and blitz through a re-development of CoasterBuzz with the forum in whatever state it's in. At least that way I'll have some real-world usage to test with. If I'm going to actually ask for money this time around, I want to be reasonably sure that it's not going to choke.

I got a lot more motivated when Federated Media picked up CB as a new author. It's too early to see if they'll deliver quality advertising (so I can get rid of that pop-up crap), but the fact that John Battelle will take a phone call from me is encouraging. Being in the company of Digg and BoingBoing certainly doesn't hurt!