It's been nine months since version 1.0 of the new site was originally launched back on New Years. Since that time a number of bug fixes and other improvements have been made based on feedback from users and the my general urge to write some Ruby code. When I began developing the new site, I knew little about Ruby and even less about Rails. Looking back through my 5,284 lines of production code and 11,330 lines of test code that currently make up the site's codebase, you can almost see a pattern of improvement in my Ruby kung-foo as time progressed. Had I to do it all over again, I'd probably make some significant changes to the underlying plumbing and would better utilize some DRY principles that I didn't fully understand when this all began. Do you see where I'm going with this? Yes, that's correct, the site is getting re-written from the ground up.

So what's in store for the new version? Well, it's hard to tell at this point and I'm certainly hoping users of the site chime in and let me know what improvements they'd like to see built into this new version. From my perspective, this particular re-factoring will focus on:

• making improvements to the user interface
• re-factoring for Rails 2.0
• implementing a more RESTful architecture
• optimizing the codebase and DRYing things up a bit
• improving the search functionality
• providing a new 'draft' feature so that users can edit blogs and stories that have been previously published
• and more as we come up with them...

It's going to take some time before the new version is released, but certainly not 2 years like the first version. Just this weekend I've written the code to manage the user registration and authentication system including all the unit and functional tests. I'll tell you what, things are going much smoother this time around.

What changes would you like to see? 

Sure, I have a few ideas, but I'm more interested to hear from you. Please consider this an invitation for you to post comments about what features, improvements, or other changes you would like to see in this next version. While I may not be able to incorporate them all, I'd probably say chances are good that I'll be able to get to most of them.

Keep the feedback coming!