Ok, so I finally think I'm worthy enough to call what I'm doing "programming" instead of simply "scripting." Of course, it's not really mind-challenging type work that I'm doing ... but it's still an accomplishment.

It's kind of amusing that the production cycle isn't going the way I thought it would be. I constantly find myself rewriting code and saying "What the heck was i thinking when I wrote that?!" And of course, I only work on features that I want; I guess that's a positive thing. All the recent feautures you see are the ones that I thought were severely lacking; this is partially why the XML, autolinking, and smilies don't work yet. In any case, I'm getting pretty satisfied with the way this site is going.

I was pretty pissed last night because I was trying to write an upgrade script to switch the gallery system over to a more ... standardized system. Right now all the three types of images (entry attachments, actual "big' images, and thumbnail images) are being stored in separate folders, but they're still being stored in one folder.

The upgrade script I wrote detected whose images were whose, then simply moved them to a subfolder (based on your userid) and upgraded the databases. I had also fixed up all the output pages and it was working nice ... except uploading didn't work because of PHP Safe Mode.

The server restriction right now is killing me. I really need to a get a separate server for this site. I've written so many modules and upgrade scripts that can't run until safe mode is off, and I'm definitely not doing that since it's currently being hosted off the same box that I'm hosting the NeoPages.net network (which recently counted 150+ free sites on it!).

But cool things that I could do if I had my own server for Tabulas:
Subdomain site access (http://username.tabulas.com) instead of the way it works now. Tony gave me the great idea of doing the /~user/ as a temporary placeholder instead of /users/username/ off the main domain. I also have written an awesome "spellchecking" feature, but again this requires PHP Safe Mode off because it has to execute the Aspell library. And of course, the gallery move.

In other related news, I think Alex has agreed to help me hack a Java applet that'll allow you to drag and drop images from your desktop to your Tabulas! And of course, Neeraj has been very patient in waiting for me to write the data filtering portion of audiomatch. I'm really looking forward to the first few weeks of summer when I can really focus a lot on these.

Of course, this summer I will also be studying for MCATs and LSATs. Hopefully an 8 hour exam will be enough to offset 4 years of crappy grades.

I also need to make a few more skins; as I told Neeraj, the skinning will filter out the good sites from the best sites. You can write a bad-ass script with great programming, but if you have a shit interface it doesn't mean anything. It's funny cause a lot of initial reactions to the beta launch of Tabulas was, "It seems really powerful and flexible." Of course, since I wrote it, I have kind of the "dirty" look of the site.

But really. Good skinning goes a long way. But I'm also working on creating clean, eloquent code so that if I ever release the source code (which is something I would like to do under GPL) people won't mock me for writing the worst code.

And in completely unrelated news, I finally figured out a good schema for handling if and else statements. Maybe it's the feminine part of me, but I like it when code LOOKS clean. The structure.

I had trouble earlier trying to figure out how I should structure the if and else statements, but I finally figured it out. It saves space, and looks cool.

I'm such a dork.