Mon, August 29, 2005

Work on the re-bee has been progressing despite the lack of updates. In fact, it's the reason there haven't been any updates – I've been too busy working (or playing poker; or driving to Irvine for stand-up comedy). But I realized something this morning: the new fall TV shows will begin trickling in next week or the week after, and if I'm still tied up with the re-bee, I'll never have time for the Annual TiVo Gauntlet of New Fall Programming.

So, it's settled: gone are the days of the hazy "mid-July" deadline. We waved bye-bye to "August 1" weeks ago. But, sometime on Labor Day, the re-bee will be complete. Heller high water. It's happening.

Recently in the re-bee:

• Search: the kickass new search engine that powers the administrative site has been deployed on the public site as well, allowing cool things like paginated results (for faster page loads), searching comments (why the hell not), and faster/more relevant results.
• "The Day That Was": a page for each day of onebee content, showing what went live that day in writing, comments, photos, etc. (A sort of compliment to the Wayback Machine on the homepage.)
• The homepage: integrating comments and the Wayback Machine, re-coded to go with onebee's new back-end.
• Accounts: the registration section and profile editor received a much-needed redesign (this was the last part to be updated in last May's lightning redesign, around 4am, and never got the attention it deserved – this is one of the reasons I initially refused to put a hard deadline on the re-bee; rush-job work never looks as good); pages are easier to use, less information is collected, there's finally an account cancellation option (don't you dare!), and randomized passwords have been inexplicably changed from eight characters to ten.
• Comics: Comics? Yes, although onebee will not be publishing any comics in the immediate future, there are some long-term plans that may incorporate such things. In the interest of never having to edit another web page again (ha!), I built the tool for the re-bee and it'll lie dormant for as long as it lies dormant.

• Internal links: sublime new system for linking to another onebee post/photo/etc. from within a onebee post, which allows me to type something like (col: tivo) and the site will provide me with search results for "tivo" and then automatically build a link to the selected item – rather than having to stop my typing, find the URL to that item, insert it, and continue. (This is cooler than it sounds, believe me.)
• Lots of data entry: In addition to all the movie reviews, I have to go through each item on the site and replace any outdated code, so the formatting will look right on the new site; also, most photographs have to be regenerated from source because the new site will display bigger pictures (and a lot of the old scans were horrible anyway).

So, we're getting there! All that remains are a few interface niceties, some kind of system for handling video (very simple), and then tying up loose ends. But if you don't hear from me this week, you'll know why!