I hired a designer to make some rockin'
icons (thanks, Jenna!) for the forthcoming POP Forums v8. It's kind of
weird how taking a break from the hardcore coding to make things pretty
is a very motivating force. It's like the entire thing becomes more
real at that point.
I finally did something a little AJAX-ish
with it too. I say "-ish" because I didn't wire in the
asynchronous-ness to it just yet. (Making up words is fun!) One of my
pet peeves for online forums is all the useless crap that gets mixed in
with the actual discussion. Seriously, I don't care what your avatar
looks like or when you joined. So in this version, I'm hiding it. Click
a name on this page,
for example. It's really the only significant UI design decision I've
made so far, but you can bet I'm going to refine the crap out of it
until it's mostly good. Less is more.
I didn't use the ASP.NET AJAX pieces because I just couldn't get it to do what I wanted, and this process just went much faster. And hey, I'll have a little script library building up too.
I've also decided to make
another performance tweak, and increase/decrease various counts instead
of counting rows all of the time. Yeah, I probably should have been
doing that six or seven years ago when I first started this forum
nonsense. I'll probably go with the good old "freshness date" approach
to make sure it hasn't somehow fallen out of sync now and then.
I
don't think I'm going to hit the milestone I was hoping to hit by the
end of the month. While that does bother me to some degree, I'm not
going to let it depress me either.