Ain't nothing more humbling than people trashing months of work in a few minutes.

Synopsis: Roughly 18 hours of straight programming to get 2.0 launch-ready. Maybe it's that I've been staring too much at the f'ing templates or the f'ing coding, but I think it'll be pretty well-received. Between fixing up some CSS issues, fixing up a few PHP bugs, moving files over, and adding new features, it doesn't really strike me that people are going to be that pissed about the changes. Sure, they might have to redo some of their templates a bit, but the bulk of it will be done by the 11th-hour script that I wrote that imports from the old version to the new version.

Truth of the matter is, I wish a lot of things were being done differently. The problem is that 1.0 was built when I was just learning PHP, so the whole architecture was flawed and weak (not to mention CPU-intensive). There was no way for me to "transition" to the new system from the old one in a smooth way - a clear break was required somewhere along the line.

Of course, it really doesn't help when the users gripe (legitimately of course!) that I didn't give them much notice before switching the systems. That is absolutely true. But again, I didn't think it to be too big of a deal; no data was being deleted in any way ...

I've realized how attached to templates people have been. 90% of the posts from the front page are along the lines of, "I've lost my templates" or "Tabulas screwed up my site" or something like that. Maybe it's a good thing people are so emotional about their Tabulas - after all, what I'm trying to build is your digital home ... and how would I feel if I woke up and found my digital home to be restyled? Probably not very happy.

I sometimes wish I had more money to throw at this project so I could hire some people. It's tough to be the only person on this whole project - I have to deal with new features, bug fixes, customer support, etc. etc. It's a particularly rough patch right here because I'm trying to transition roughly a 50,000 user base system from one dilapidated system to a new upgraded system.

But I know if I can just weather this initial 2.0 launch, things'll be alright. New features in the pipeline, plus I can get paid for licensing 2.0 to a company that's waiting for it ... maybe then I can throw some money at this project.

To see users so attached to their Tabulas on that emotional level... I just wish they understood how much more it is for me. They get peeved (understandably) in their own little Tabulas accounts - I have the whole system which is "my baby." It hurts to see people immediately discount the hidden gains made from this new release ... I guess we're all just really attached to our Tabulas, aren't we :)

I need to sleep some. Hopefully the response will be better when I wake up ... but if not ... sigh. What are you going to do?