Better Santa Claus water the tree than on my house o' servers if you ask me. With Christmas quickly approaching and recognizing that the site has now been in development well over a year, I figured I would give everyone a status update. Obviously, I fail to keep the main site updated with news, so I'll use this blog as my outlet. Guess what, the site is still in development, but there is hope.

The challenge now a days isn't so much about the production code, it's more about getting the test code written so I can ensure that one small change to an itsy bitsy hunk of ruby doesn't turn into mass failure in other parts of the site. So let's get down to business here, what's up with the site, right?

There are four main sections to the site (i.e., Blogs, Stories, Media, Music). Right now, I have three of them complete.

1. Blogs
2. Stories
3. Music

For the last week or so, I've been writing endless lines of unit and functional test code to ensure that everything functions as expected. Needless to say, I managed to discover dozens of small bugs which I've fixed and included tests for along the way. I'm actually up to a ratio of 1:1.6 with regard to production/test code. Don't believe me, check it out...

Yes, that's right...5,515 lines of code that have nothing to do over the Christmas holiday except ensure that I don't do anything stupid while typing ruby code into Textmate. Despite a fair amount of test code, I'm just getting started, I want to bump that ratio up to about 1:2.5. Given that I haven't written hardly any integration tests and still have about 50% of the functional tests to write for the blog section, I should be able to hit that ratio in the near future.

So what else do I have left before this can be moved officially into production and be served up at the www host instead of the ruby host? Well, my goal is to have the last section completed by Christmas. Even though that's the last major section left, there are a few other minor sections left to develop. Here's the breakdown.

Major Sections

1. Media – A graphical euphoria of images and videos. I had this on the old site, it's time to port it into a new skin.

Minor Sections

1. User page – This will display information about users of the site as well as allow logged in users to modify their preferences and view submissions they've added to the site.
2. Privacy policy page – I don't know why I'm bothering with this, I had a class about it and thought it would be interesting to write a privacy policy, I might change my mind for the sake of releasing this beast.
3. About page – A general overview of the site, where it started and how it evolved over the years.
4. Contact page – Just a simple way for people to submit feedback via email and through an online submission form. This includes bugs reports and feature requests.
5. Search – Duh, wouldn't it be nice to search across the whole site or within each individual section. I'll have to get this working before the initial release as well.
6. XML feeds – Nothing more than a page that lists the feeds.

So come Christmas, will this site be released? Only if Santa and his elves setup shop in my apartment and polish some of these sections of themselves. I look for a release sometime early next year, but then again, if you are reading this, it doesn't really matter since this is the production site for now. Peace!