November 30, 2004

Programming a bulletin board system from scratch is something that can't be compared to anything else. It's not like it's a very hard task, on the contrary it's quite pleasant to develop new features every day (the only boring part would be to make sure everything can be translated to any language), but it's very long to implement. Every day I'm adding new code, and progressively it's looking a bit more like a "professional" forum system. It's still far from an Invision or phpBB module of course, but at least it's my code. It's very rewarding when you manage to emulate features from the best forum systems. Recently I added support for avatars, user information, and a feature that I'll develop further in the coming months, revolving around uploading files by yourself and having other people comment on them and rate them. The more I work on the website, the more I hope I'll be able to make a perfect interface between the software (KMJ) and the website. It's really going to be a fun place to be, and I don't want to make any mistakes while developing the online code. Again, please bear with me. If you're interested in knowing what I'm doing apart from that... How does it feel to lose several days and knowing you'll never get them back? Now I know. I've been looking into hardware websites for months just to find the "perfect" new machine for me, making sure it'll have a RAID system to ensure maximum security for my hard drive data, etc. And guess what? One day I woke up, turned on my machine and had my hard drive litterally crash in front of me. I managed to retrieve most of my "work" data, having made a copy of it the week before, although I spent a day trying to rebuild the data before I realized I did make that copy. Yes, isn't that silly. Anyway, I got the website and software to work again, but I still lost about 3gb of miscellaneous data with the crash. Apart from the work data, I managed to repair about 1gb of lost data, but it took me several days, hence the feeling I really lost my time in a time where I really don't want to reschedule the release of the website. I still want to publish it before the new year. Really. And it'll be done. Maybe even before Christmas. Provided I don't get another hard drive crash in the meantime. Ever heard of the Murphy law?

Anyway, everything's fine now. The website is looking better every day, I'm sure most of you will appreciate the additions. And if you don't, well, I'll try to add an alternative version of the website that looks mostly like the current one. But I'm sure I won't have to ;o)