Lessons from the relaunch of CoasterBuzz.com

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.