[thesite] Codefest 2 wrapup.

[Daniel J. Cody]

Quickie wrapup to get everyone up to speed..

Friday night we got back to oshkosh(after dan pulled another idiot move 
of leaving his mobile phone at the airport(one hour diversion ensues)), 
kinda sat around for a bit, caught up with eachother.. Rudy came bearing 
liquor and find canadian maple syrup.

Lacking pancakes, rudy cracked a bottle of jamacian rum. I asked him 
what he wanted to mix it with and he responded, "Ice". heh.

Rudy proceeded to get sauced before we even got to the bar, where jeff 
and i proceeded to get sauced while rudy, coming down at this point, 
switched to water :) Jen stopped in to say hi and had a couple beers 
with us too. Saturday, we got to work at the early(we didnt get started 
at codefest 1 till about 5pm on saturday due to hangovers, etc.) 1pm, 
and proceeded to put together a to do list, based on shit from the TTLD 
list, which 'Nuh kept for us.

First thing on the TDL was change all LONG datatypes in the DB to CLOB's 
so we could search and do cool shit with them. This proceeded to kick 
our collective ass'es for about two hours at which point we decided to 
move onto something that we could actually make progress on. Jeff and I 
started with the conversion to the SSURLS(Super Sexy URL Scheme), 
basically rewriting the URL scheme we put in place at codefest 1. Rudy 
went to work on cleaning up the DB's and getting them to the point where 
we could merge our test database(which has shitloads of new and improved 
features, better structure, etc) with our production one. This turned 
out to be not a small task as well.

<insert lots of "FUCKING SHIT!'s", "WTF DID I JUST DO?!?", "Uhhh's", 
"Hey, thats pretty cool's", head scratching, "OOPS's", "Hey guys, I just 
wiped our production database!", dry eyes, and coding here>

About 11pm Jen showed up, ready to take us out, and about 12pm we got to 
the bar, had a couple drinks, talked, smoked, and went to bed. Jeff 
stayed up while we were all sleeping on my PC and kept coding shit in 
till 4am.

At 10am  we awoke to snow and went back to work. I found out that a 
sports car really doesn't handle for a shit in snow, and pondered if i'd 
ever see my z3 or girlfriend again as both took off to milwaukee, 
leaving 3 computer geeks, a dodge spirit, a fucked database, and 4 hours 
to get to the airport 90 minutes away.

We got a couple things done but started sweating when the DB wasn't 
fixed by 1:45(rudy's plane leaving at 3:30) and we still had 90 minutes 
of driving on shitty roads to do. Thankefully everything appeared to 
work(Dan: "We forgot to dump the sequences before the import!" Rudy: 
"Well lets hope *that* doesn't fuck something up" naturally, not dumping 
the sequences being the one true thing that could fuck up the DB.. heh)

After an intensive 90 second check to make sure we still had data 
integrity and that shit, for the most part, still worked, we bailed the 
fuck outa' dodge in a mad rush to get Rudy's plane before it left for 
the Great White North without him. Apparently, we made it before his 
plane did.(grr)

So, what did we get done?

- SSURLS which will draw lots and lots of spiders in to index our site.
- made some progress on the 'members' pages
- cleaned up the DB a ton, and synched out new DB Structure/data with 
the old one(both test.evolt.org and evolt.org are pulling of the same DB 
now, which is nice)
- config'd it so you don't need cookies enabled to do a lot of shit.
- made a *lot* of performance fixes. The new site really flies, from an 
application level.
- fixed the grr'bot mostly(jeff?)
- took out old centers
- added new centers(Usability and Web Business)(someone should probably 
write something up on the site about these new centers and what they're for)
- got all admin shit working(as far as adding/editing/approving/deleting 
articles)
- umm. i'm sure there's more, having a hard time thinking off all these 
things right now.

Things we *didnt* get done?

- User defined style sheets(didnt even touch it)
- member pages(partly)
- convert LONG -> CLOB's
- converting the Old URL's into New URL's(for people that have specific 
articles bookmarked, etc)
- lots of other shit i can't think of.

Things that we *need* to get done?(We've decided that we may not have 
all new features totally implemented by the 14th of Dec, so we're going 
to cut the fat and go live with what we can, adding the things we can't 
get done as we get them done)

- Convert old url -> new url(this is my job in the next couple days)
- convert long -> clob(my job as well)
- Rudy and Seth need to rap about thetips DB strucutre(thats up to you two)
- Fix a lot of smaller, annoying bugs.

So, jeff is going to be busy with work as soon as he gets back. I'm 
going to be working on the above two items. We could 
*REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEALY* use some help finding, 
identifying and documenting bugs on the new site. If we don't have to 
find them and shit, we can spend the time fixing them.

There are 60+ people on thesite list, so if everyone of you could find 
just *one* bug, we could have all the problems identified and then get 
to fixing them. This is pretty important, and I'm asking for everyones 
help :)

So, to sum up, start testing that new site! Let us know what needs to be 
fixed/addressed by sending an email to thesite at lists.evolt.org with 
[bug] in the Subject field. I've got a special filter set up to filter 
them into a bug folder so i can fix them faster.

So hammer the smurf out of http://test.evolt.org - try everything you 
can think of to break it, and let us know when you do. Don't worry about 
fucking up the DB somehow as we're back on the test one again for 
testing purposes. Let me know if anyone has questions or comments or 
anything like that..

Thanks bunches :)

.djc.