State of the State
Posted by Bill Rini @ 5:09 amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I wanted to have a space to share as many of the Window Six projects/products are developed between contract assignments. That means that while I would have loved to get a new version of TextAds out the door last year I had too much paying work coming in to devote any serious time to it. Hopefully this weblog will allow anybody who’s interested to check in and see the pace of progress. I’ll post tentitive schedules, project plans, feature lists, use cases, and other stuff here so people can track what’s going on.
So here’s a quick rundown on the projects I’m working on and where you can keep in the loop. The nav bar over to the left have a “categories” section. General is . . . the general stuff like this post and random thoughts, raves, and rants. The rest of the nav items (as of this writing) deal with specific projects.
BabyURL is an experiment I created to test out some design issues for the next version of TextAds. It’s basically a URL shortner. Paste in that monster URL from Amazon, MapQuest or any other site that has a long URL and you get back a nice short URL that you can use instead of the long one. It’s pretty much done (for the moment) though I’ll be adding in some statistics and other interesting doodads as I get time. I’ve started a feature list for the next round of improvements but it’s still quite new and as such the list is evolving as I get feedback from users. In fact, if you have feedback, feature requests or any other input, please post them here in the comments.
Blog is an unstarted project I’m hoping to get around to soon. As you may note this weblog runs on a piece of open source software called b2. I searched high and low for a weblog that was fast, easy to extend, and had all the minimal functionality one needs to make a weblog as easy to use as possible. I wasn’t really interested in hosted solutions (like Blogger) or Content Management Systems pretending to be weblogs like PostNuke (which I use on other sites and know the head honcho who runs the project). What I wanted was something light and fast and b2 seemed to be the best choice. Only problem is that the guy who wrote b2 isn’t supporting it any longer. It’s forked off in a couple of directions with the one fork, Word Press, being the officially blessed fork. I tried Word Press and while I was impressed with the additional features the new team had added, I wasn’t really happy with the direction they were taking it. I tried to get under the hood and noticed that they had begun to marry together the business logic, data access/manipulation, and presentation layers. Yech! If you have no desire to customize it beyond simple templates it’s probably not that big of a deal but I do plan to customize and extend it so it was a significant turn-off for me. There were other issues too. For instance (and this is a leftover problem from b2) the software seems to depend on a lot of SQL queries using LIKE against VARCHAR fields which could be made much more efficient by searching against INT. Too geeky? Ok, my final mark against it was when I mentioned some of these issues to the developers and they sort of brushed me off with comments that lead me to believe these aren’t simple architecture/coding mistakes but intentional decisions. Like I said previously, if you have no intent to modify the software it’s probably not a big deal but as I did want to write some add-ons I became very concerned that the direction the Word Press developers were going in would cut me off. So I pinged a fellow blogger and b2 user and proposed that we re-write it. We’re still hammering out the goals and to some degree whether or not it’s even worth the effort but hopefully this will be something that we get started on in the coming months.
Believe it or not, managing your DNS settings doesn’t have to be difficult. You don’t need to know the difference between a CNAME and a SOA record any more than you should need to know the difference between POST and GET in order to leave a comment on this site. DNS Manager will be a for-profit service that allows people to register domain names, create DNS entries and basically manage their own DNS in a user friendly way. Currently DNS Manager only exists on paper and in my head. That should begin to change over the next 30 - 60 days as I start to put a project plan around it and can begin creating tasks that can be acted on. If you’re interested in such a service check back here because I’ll probably be posting quite a bit as I develop use cases and other planning documents (some of which I’ll post here too so you can see how things are coming together). I’ll also post progress and status reports as they become available.
Last but not least . . . TextAds. Yes, it’s been nearly two years since the last release but then again it’s being used on hundreds of websites (that I can verify) and has over 2000 downloads so it seems to be doing the job it set out to do quite well. Problem is that I hacked it together very quickly as something only I would use. Then other website owners started emailing me and asking if they could license it from me. So I released it open source to avoid the hassles of trying to come up with a licensing scheme for a software product I didn’t have the resources to provide commercial level support for (though that doesn’t seem to stop a lot of people from releasing commercial software). Now I cringe when I look at the code and so I’ve wanted to re-write it from scratch almost from the day I put it on SourceForge. Well, the need to make a living got in the way of that and so here we are two years later. The good news is that I am planning on re-writing it from scratch. I’ve been doodling on scratch pads new features, designs, and architecture over that two year release lull and I think people are going to like the new version. Actually, there will be two new versions. One will be a hosted service that will charge a percentage of ad sales for users who wish to go with an outsourced solution and later a stripped down version will be released open source (by stripped down, I mean with the service level functions removed — why create my own competitors?
So that’s what I’m up to. Check back often for updates!
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