01-03-2019, 12:26 PM
Time for a progress report. The World Wide Web is about to become kewl as fuck again. If this thing catches on, you'll be seeing 2001-style private websites popping up all over the place. You know...
The kind of websites you used to spend hours on because they were so goddamned much fun!!!!11
Ahem. But I digress.
The PHP class library is essentially done. These are the software objects that model the data and provide services such bbCode parsing, file uploading, and so forth. I'm going to go back through them and add strategic query result and HTML fragment caching to improve performance. Without caching, hitting the database with the same queries and re-rendering the same pages over and over for every pageview will bring the server to a grinding halt. Best to have as much of that shit pre-assembled and stored in files as possible.
The SQL queries for the alert system started looking quite hairy, with long, inscrutable conditional clauses based on user preferences, so I decided on a programatic approach for filtering them based on cached user preferences and bookmarks. I think updating the mailbox and alert windows no more frequently than every 30 seconds will keep things running smoothly. Ain't nobody gonna be in that big of a hurry when they're chillin' with their buddies all day anyhow.
To keep the bookmarks module simple, it will only bookmark member profiles, as that was what Trix specifically requested. The bookmarks window will have a little search engine for finding bookmarked users by username or phrases in their custom titles and "about me" sections, with username matches appearing first in the ranked search results. Searching the forum and blogs will be handled by the main search engine.
The JavaScript for chat, private messages, alerts, and updating your profile and preferences is essentially completed. I need to go back and tweak it a bit to work with the newer backend classes.
After that, more or less the only thing left to do is to write the main scripts that make use of all of the above modules to render HTML pages. Then I'll go through the CSS files, weed out the lame ones, name the pretty ones, and add them to the database.
Next comes the testing phase to make sure all of this stuff works as expected.
Finally, the beta release and fixing user-reported bugs.
The kind of websites you used to spend hours on because they were so goddamned much fun!!!!11
Ahem. But I digress.
The PHP class library is essentially done. These are the software objects that model the data and provide services such bbCode parsing, file uploading, and so forth. I'm going to go back through them and add strategic query result and HTML fragment caching to improve performance. Without caching, hitting the database with the same queries and re-rendering the same pages over and over for every pageview will bring the server to a grinding halt. Best to have as much of that shit pre-assembled and stored in files as possible.
The SQL queries for the alert system started looking quite hairy, with long, inscrutable conditional clauses based on user preferences, so I decided on a programatic approach for filtering them based on cached user preferences and bookmarks. I think updating the mailbox and alert windows no more frequently than every 30 seconds will keep things running smoothly. Ain't nobody gonna be in that big of a hurry when they're chillin' with their buddies all day anyhow.
To keep the bookmarks module simple, it will only bookmark member profiles, as that was what Trix specifically requested. The bookmarks window will have a little search engine for finding bookmarked users by username or phrases in their custom titles and "about me" sections, with username matches appearing first in the ranked search results. Searching the forum and blogs will be handled by the main search engine.
The JavaScript for chat, private messages, alerts, and updating your profile and preferences is essentially completed. I need to go back and tweak it a bit to work with the newer backend classes.
After that, more or less the only thing left to do is to write the main scripts that make use of all of the above modules to render HTML pages. Then I'll go through the CSS files, weed out the lame ones, name the pretty ones, and add them to the database.
Next comes the testing phase to make sure all of this stuff works as expected.
Finally, the beta release and fixing user-reported bugs.
