The Home Office

Working from home is great. No commute, no boss looking over your shoulder, no dress code, no stress, no hassle. Most of the time that is.

Discipline can be awkward. Yesterday for example. The plan was to work straight through the day & night on optimising a couple of features for the AN Guide (geek: really couldn't justify loading 250K javascript on every New Thread page just on the occasional off chance it might be needed...).

It wasn't a big "pressure cooker" working day, the self set deadline of "before sleep" was vague enough to allow for plenty of pizza & half life zombie killing breaks, maybe even check New Posts every hour or so to keep the brain from stagnating. And yes, gosh darn it, friends could visit for a little while on the understanding I'd continue to work.

That's the plan explained. "Gatecrash Woolies' for a party" means that the next morning hosts an empty case of cider, full ash tray, red wine stains on the bed and a friend in hospital. The javascript works though. I think...

The Future's Bright, The Future's Purple

So after surprisingly few bugs found during the launch of the AN Guide (about two dozen, more than half cosmetic) I decided it was time to break stuff properly.

My intentions had been for a piece-by-piece roll out of additional options, starting with allowing everyone else to add their own gigs, shows, events, bands, whatevers but plans & intentions have never been favourites. Instead Christmas time was spent playing with new toys.

The new toys being the next version of the vBulletin software upon which the Guide is built. New versions are a mix of scary and exciting for third-party developers like myself. Scary because you're never sure just how much of your own code will break and need rewritten at speed to keep up. And exciting because there's always new possibilities revealed.

And in the spirit of Christmas, all my code works perfectly well on the new version, built in future-proofing I can feel kinda smug about (even if it is half down to the vB Devs!)

The exciting possibilities? Well it's tabs. Yes, the forum software is going to go all MySpace on you and have lots of funky social networking features on your profile page and that means tabs. It may not sound like much to you, but to me-trying to cram heaps of information all onto a single web page-tabs are cool. Well implemented & fast rendering tabs are shiny, shiny goodness.

In fact, too good to wait for. So I uploaded a couple of files from the new software and got it to work for me here & now. I even succombed to a request and uploaded a new purple grape style http://www.altnation.com/guide/aberdeen/?styleid=45

And on that smug note I shall gloss over all the stuff I broke while adding the tabs. No one will notice, I'm sure...

The AltNation Guide - Launch Day

I often find it difficult to stop. To decide when a feature set is enough. To decide that yes, now is the time to release a project to the world. I always want to tinker and improve just that little bit more...

The AltNation Guide has been the Everest of that procrastination but today after months of coding myself and a couple of weeks of testing live on altnation.com, "THE GUIDE" got shown to the world.

Ten minutes later I had found more than half a dozen issues that need fixing. One fairly major critical bug that actually logs members out of the site. Luckily I was able to remove all mention, links and documentation of he offending page so no one knows it's lieing there broken.

Sleep at 7am and waking up again at 11am has left breakfast and and afternoon nap as higher priority that fixing things though. For a little while at least...