Okay, so July’s traffic numbers are in. And, for the year so far, July is the second worst month of the year in terms of traffic. (It beat February by 7 visitors.) On the plus side, it had more traffic than last July. In fact, it’s traffic was better than each of the five worst months last year. (Last year, July was the third worst month in traffic.)

Anyway, in terms of updates, as you may recall, on Friday early morning, I had 22 out of 318 things done in that second big block to do. As of now, it is 317 things out of 317 things. (Yeah… Either I counted wrong or I missed one somewhere. Gotta recheck later…) That includes the third and fourth parts of that block. All that’s left is some miscellaneous clean-up.

Along the way, I’ve discovered that the “fix” I made on the navigation system isn’t working. It works for the first level, but not past that. Fortunately, that was already counted in my list of things to do, as I wasn’t sure if the navigation system was truly finished until I could test it after the big blocks of stuff were done.

I’ve also found other issues I need to correct, plus took care of others, so, right now, my list of 14 things remaining to do has shrunk to 13 things left to do. It would be 14, but I already fixed one of the new problems that cropped up. Of those, 5 are things I need to do before I can let people in.

With any luck, that’ll be soon.

Earlier in the week, I mentioned that I was about 15% of the way done with the other big block of stuff to do. (The other being still at 99%, which has not changed from yesterday.)

Well, it’s actually a four-part block as opposed to a two-part block. So, that means that the 15% complete would actually be less. But, don’t worry about that now. As far as the first part of the block goes, it is now 100% done. The second part of the block is also 100% done. The third part is about 7% complete, which is 22 out of 318 items. The fourth part is about the same.

On the total list, the 17 items left to do is now down to 14 items. I scratched off three items from the list earlier in the day. As mentioned before, some of the other items require that I first finish the two big chunks of stuff to do, one of which is 99% complete. So, once I get these two big blocks out of the way, the other items will (hopefully!!!) go faster.

Nothing much but updates here….

Yesterday, I mentioned I was 44% finished with the first block of stuff I needed to do.

As of now, I am 100% finished with that part.

Well, actually, let’s call it 99% complete. About halfway through today, I realized there was something else I should be including. So, that is included on some of what I did today, but I have to go back and add it to the stuff I already did. That’s about 60% of the stuff I did, so I’ll need to go back through those and add it in. But, that shouldn’t take as long as the initial work. Hopefully.

And, my list of things to do has grown to 17 items. Fortunately, some of the new additions won’t be too time consuming to do.

So, that’s where things stand at the moment. Tomorrow, er later today, it’ll be time to tackle some more things.

Right now, it’s time for sleep…

Yesterday, I mentioned that I was 20% done with one block of the two big blocks of stuff I need to do.

Well, I didn’t get as far as I had hoped. As of now, I am 44% complete. So, I only managed to knock out another 24% today.

On the other block, I am still only about 15% of the way done because I didn’t touch that at all today.

I really wanted to be further along than what I am. I would do more tonight, but I am tired and my legs are getting sore sitting in this chair, so I’m going to wrap up this post and call it a day.

Meanwhile, my list of things to do has grown from twelve items to fifteen items. Of the three new items, one of them will be a pretty simple thing to implement. Just one bit of code and that’ll be done. The other two aren’t hard but they require rebuilding two databases. Fun.

You’re probably getting tired of updates, but it’s really all I have to write about these days.

So, yesterday and up until now, I have been working on the two big blocks of stuff I need to do. On the one part, I did maybe 30% of half the work. It’s a two-part effort, so basically I’m 15% done with that. On the other block of stuff, I’m about 20% complete. I did have to code a processing form that helps me do these, so that took a little bit of time to code and test. But, after that, it’s mostly just a lot of plugging in of data. Some bits take longer than others, so those tend to slow things down.

We’ll see how much more I can get done Tuesday night.

I also discovered a database issue I overlooked when I rebuilt the other ones. I neglected to change one that needs to be changed in order to mesh with the changes made in the other databases. Shouldn’t be too big of a deal; just a matter of getting to it.

I hope that I can get things wrapped up relatively soon so that I can start letting the pioneers in.

Yesterday, I mentioned the things I had to do on Sunday. There were twelve things on my list and my hope was to get things down into the single digits on the To-Do list.

Well, that didn’t happen.

First, I worked on the navigation system, wherein I ran into some problems. I’ve got that straightened out, hopefully. But, it’s not completely done. It works as far as I can test it now, but I can’t do a full test until other things are scratched off the list. So, this is one that can only be marked as partially done.

I did some work on four other features on the list.

I was able to scratch one thing completely off the list. Yay!

But, I thought of something else that wasn’t on the list that should be. So, the net result is that there are still a dozen things to do on the list.

There are five things that need to be done before I can let in the pioneers. Yesterday, there were six things, so that’s an improvement. But, no, the sixth thing was not the thing I crossed off the list. The sixth thing was actually the navigation system. While it’s not fully complete, it is complete enough to let the pioneers in. Once, of course, the other five things are completed.

As I’ve mentioned before, two of the items are the time-consuming ones. I’ve done a little bit on those, but not a whole lot because of the other stuff I’ve been working on. Plus, battling with CSS is never fun either.

I think it’s time for a nap…

It’s July 25th! It’s officially Christmas in July! Save big on your holiday purchases!

Too bad I’m not really selling anything. Well, except for the eBooks, but they’re not on sale. Sorry.

Anyway, it’s the thought that counts, right?

By the way, there are now 153 shopping days until Christmas.

So, time for another progress report.

I mentioned yesterday a few things I was working on regarding the forum system.

Well, a lot of that is done, actually. I made the database changes I mentioned needed to be done. I also did the admin-oriented feature I mentioned that would sometimes be useful for users too. Did that and tested it. Seems to be working fine.

I did a fair amount of the recoding needed too. I made the change from a linear structure to a more flexible structure. All that’s left to do in that regard is the navigation system. I have started it, but it’s not complete yet. It’s late now, so I am going to get some sleep. I should mention I also did some yard work today. Otherwise, I might have had this thing done.

Anyway, hopefully I will be able to get the navigation system finished later today. But, you never know what problems you might run into. With the other changes I made today, I did run into problems that I needed to solve. Hopefully, I won’t run into any major issues while implementing the navigation system.

If I’m not missing anything on my To-Do list, I have twelve things left to finish on the forum system, including the navigation system. Of these, six need to be done before I can let in the pioneers and a number of others should be done before I let in the pioneers.

I don’t think I’ll be able to get all those done this weekend. In fact, I know I won’t. Two of them are easy but time-consuming. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to finish up the navigation system later today. If all goes well with that, maybe I can knock out a couple others. If I can get down to the single digits on the To-Do list, that would be good.

So, here is an update, especially for those would-be pioneers anxiously (hopefully!) awaiting their stagecoach passes…

As recorded in several posts this week, I took care of a few things this week on the forum system.

As for the “complex” bit I mentioned, well, that has taken some pondering. I basically had two ways to do it.

The first was the way I had it. I just needed to do some amount of re-coding to get things to work the way they should. I have a “lite” version of the forum system on another site that is working, however, the advanced bit that I thought was working doesn’t. The reason is because, on the other site, there is only one of something while on the new site, there are a number of them. Where one works just fine, with multiples it doesn’t. I don’t remember if I thought I had that solved or if I just figured I’d take care of it on the full version. Either way, it wasn’t working for the full version.

So, there was one way of fixing it, and I was thinking along that way as to how to get it to work. Somewhere in there I realized that I didn’t want to be restricted to that one way of doing it. It was much too linear, whereas what I would prefer is something more flexible.

Flexibility became the goal. That created a new set of problems. Mainly, it created problems for navigation because, while there could be multiple ways of getting somewhere, once there, you’d have to find the way back. And there was the problem. You don’t want to get into something and them, upon leaving, taking an entirely different track then you took to get in, especially if you were looking for something you had already passed.

However, shortly afternoon today, as in just a few minutes after noon, I arrived at what I believe to be a solution to that problem. Coincidentally, it is similar to a solution I used for an almost completely different problem earlier on, way back when I was still working on the “lite” version on the other website.

So, I need to make a change to the database and then begin coding. And, while I’m making changes to that database, I might as well make changes to another database to code in another feature I want to add. It’s not a user-oriented feature so much as it is an admin-oriented feature, but it is something that may be beneficial to some users in the future. And it’s probably something I should have thought to do a long time ago, but it hadn’t crossed my mind.

Well, well, back to work…

The other day, I mentioned I found a bug:

And then last night, or perhaps it was in the wee early hours this morning, I discovered another bug I need to fix. Basically, it limits logins to one user per computer. For a lot of people that probably isn’t even an issue. But, if anyone has a spouse or someone they share a computer with, and they both want an account, it becomes a problem.

That’s fixed now.

Or, I should say it is hopefully fixed now. There are two areas I have to test. The first has been tested and the fix holds true. The second hasn’t been tested yet. That part involves the timeout feature, so I need to wait until it actually times out in order to be sure. But, I’m reasonably sure if the new code works for the other part, it will also work for the timeout. That’s something I’ll probably confirm tomorrow, when I can leave the window open in the background while doing something else. I’d do it now, but I plan to be in bed before the timeout would occur.

Yesterday, I mentioned something else…

And now it occurs to me that I may be able to make a small change to it to make it a bit easier too. Hmmm… I think I’ll go test that…

That’s done too. Did that one last night after posting that.

Next up is the “complex” changes I need to make. The thinking and planning may be more complex than the actual coding. That’s a bit of a hold-up, as I want to do it right. It’s more or less getting the concept down. From there, the implementation should be relatively easy.

Also, today I thought of another new idea. Just need to figure out how to do it…

I just finished re-coding the portion of the forum system I mentioned the past couple days.

So far, so good.

It basically amounted to changing one section of code, and everything fell into place on its own. Technically, it should be able to accommodate 9,999,999 posts per second. Not that that is likely to happen or that the server could even handle it, but I wanted to have plenty of leeway. Perhaps I tended toward overkill, but I’d rather have overkill than cut things too short, you know?

By comparison, Twitter’s maximum tweets per second so far was just short of 3,300 tweets per second. Twitter has probably over 20 million members or thereabouts. So, it’s likely very much overkill to be able to accommodate 9,999,999 posts per second. If 20 million members only results in a high of 3,300 tweets per second, I’d possibly need to have over 60 billion members. The population of the Earth is under 7 billion.

So, yeah, maybe it’s a bit of overkill, but hopefully that will help future-proof it.

And now it occurs to me that I may be able to make a small change to it to make it a bit easier too. Hmmm… I think I’ll go test that…