I flipped the switch to turn CoasterBuzz back on a little after 3 a.m. last night, once I was content with the data conversion and had the basic content up.
Being
a one-man show for this kind of thing is a very different experience
than what you see in a team environment. While I don't feel like I've
pulled off any huge feats of programming, I'm reminded that the forum
app clocks in around 10k lines of code, and CoasterBuzz specific code
is around 2k lines. I should probably give myself more credit than I
do. Hacking together a site with a bunch of free apps isn't that hard,
but doing it all from scratch is quite an effort.
By morning I
had found about two dozen "issues," three of which were actual bugs.
The one was a silly mistake amplified by the fact that Google's bot was
hammering the page over and over on ten second intervals. You'd think
the smart people at Google would not let that happen. Once I cleared
those from the log, there were a few things to clean up, and lots of
formatting issues.
The forum search indexing is going a little
slow, and I wonder if there's a better way to do it. I mean, in real
life it wouldn't be an issue because there aren't generally hundreds of
thousands of posts queued for indexing, but I still think about it. I
cranked it up to one topic per second and the server just choked over
disk thrashing. One topic every two seconds seems to be going a lot
more smoothly.
That server has been running now at The Planet
for five years. It's a 2.4 GHz P4 white box with a couple of standard
hard drives and 2 gigs of RAM. I've wanted to upgrade for some time,
but I don't really want to pay more when it's adequate 99% of the time.
Hopefully this will give me a better idea of how the forum performs too. It has been running on PointBuzz
since November, but it's a lower traffic site, and it never really gets
tested. I suppose I'm curious more for me than anyone else. I still
have that little site to sell the forum, but honestly I'm not sure if
I'm that motivated to truly sell it to the world at large, even for a
couple hundred buck in revenue per year. I still wrote it for my sites
first and foremost.
The integrity, or lack thereof, of the the
coaster and park databases bothers me, but that'll be resolved over
time. There are a lot of ugly tools on the back end for me to manipulate
that data, and I'd like to find a way to expose them to users in a
reversible fashion. That was one of my early goals going to back to
2006, and one of the things that created a big hang up for me.
On
July 1, I lost my job. That day I decided that it was now or never if
there was every going to be a CBv4. I threw away most of what I had and
started over. Looking back, there were probably around 160 actual man
hours involved, spread over the two months. I don't think I've been
that focused since I wrote my book. I didn't feel that focused, but all
of a sudden, I put some color around the site layout, it felt more
real, and I was a lot more driven to get it done.
There's plenty
to do, of course, but key word is "enabled." Now the infrastructure is
in place that I can make good on things I'd like to try, whereas, I
used to be bound to the mistakes and limitations of my experience level
of five years ago. Working at Insurance.com made me nuts at times, but
it also gave me a lot to think about in terms of building something
that's easily maintained and scaled.
For now, my brain needs a break. Perhaps I'll go see a movie tomorrow. Maybe then I'll get a job.