This is a blog related to doItLater.com. It will talk about the development of the site, highlight interesting content on the site, and just generally drone on about my experiences related to the site.
Background
I first put the site up about 2.5 years ago (fall of 2005). It occurred to me that it’d be easy to make a college-humor-like site, just with better content (CH is mostly just attention-craving college girls’ boobs with “CollegeHumor” written on them mixed with some occasional shamings/chiefings with people standing around giving “the shocker” symbol with their hands). Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for CH. There are a ton of similar sites, and theirs was coded better & promoted better so they triumphed in the end. I just think there’s also room for other sites. In fact, Jacob Lodwick who wrote the site went to the same school as I did (RIT) but I think he left right before I came in.
Now that you know my motivation, the details are just that I cobbled together the code as a side-project based on the framework of another site I was doing. I got a semi-decent amount of content up there and just kind of let it stew. In keeping with the name, I indefinitely procrastinated on all of the development tasks I should have been doing on doItLater.
My little brother liked looking over my shoulder at this stuff, but most of it (and most of the internet in general) was out of his age-bracket, so for his birthday, I whipped up an age-appropriate skin and implanted some age-management code throughout the site. My brother’s site, ConnorRocks.com, actually computes his age dynamically and only shows content that is appropriate for his age. I really enjoy that sanitary version of the site, but my brother keeps getting older! At some point, I’m probably going to make a version with a pegged age-limit just so that there is always an innocent safe-for-work version of the site.
Revamp underway!
Given the nature of the site (basically devoted to procrastination) I’m probably never going to finish the revamp, but I’m giving it a shot. Since it was written really hackishly based on code for another site, there is a bunch of unneeded stuff which reaks of my three-years-ago coding style (before the web-standards gestapo got to me and the APC op-code cacher restored my faith in Object-Oriented PHP as a feasibly-fast tool).
The decision to re-write the site was partially based on the fact that the site still gets a few thousand page views per day and it’s just completely neglected. On top of that, I had some ideas for a media site and I decided to just start with what I already had. The final kicker is that life kind of sucks for me right now, and I need a creative outlet again. Coding kills the pain.
Although there is no real reason to, I’ve made the code Open Source. Honestly, I think the primary reason this ended up being my choice is that I love Ohloh to pieces, it makes coding even more fun (everyone loves stats, end of story) and I wanted an excuse to use it. For those unfamiliar, Ohloh is a site/tool which you give access to a public SVN (or CVS, etc.) repository and it looks at your code, counts the lines in each language, number of comments, number of commits, etc.; calculates the financial value of your code, and gives you all kinds of sweet graphs. I check my page like 5 times a day even though it only updates about once every three-to-five days.
During this revamp, I have a lot of cool features I plan to add, but first I’m removing the suck from the existing code. I’m putting in some object-oriented code where it’s useful, and overall just making it way better. Currently I’ve refactored a bunch of the code, and I’m getting close to releasing it, I just have to iron out some IE7 display issues (what else is new?).
The main philosophy of the new site is that although I have a little time now to blow on this thing while I heal, I can’t be maintaining this thing forever. So I’m going to write it to be such sweet code that the site (and its users) can run the whole thing. If something is totally automated and it works, then that’s some good code!
The Future
You’ll have to see! When the site changes its look, you’ll know I deployed the new code. It won’t do much that’s different from your point of view at that first moment, but the code will be in a nice state where everything can be written much more easily from then on. There will be small perks like the ability to use 800×600 resolution fine while still expanding for larger monitors automatically (currently it’s just squeezed down for 800×600), but the big stuff will come later.
Keep your eyes open, and please if you think of anything, just email me at “submit” at the domain name of the site I’m talking about. I actually will read your email and I actually will respond to it. Crazy concept, huh?
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