Besides having to deal with household stuff while the 'rents are both out of town (I consider the house not burning down a success story), I've been trying to juggle multiple commitments across the board. Here's what's been happening in the Tabulas world:

Tabulas Platform

I recently licensed the Tabulas platform, so I've been spending time installing it, fixing some random bugs, and getting their site off the ground. This has led me to start refactoring most of the code to allow for future installs on other domains - I want to start licensing the software to anyone who wants to run their own versions.

This is a bit difficult right now because Tabulas.com itself doesn't use the Tabulas platform. The Tabulas platform itself is a series of hacks from Tabulas.com to be used on other domains - it's certainly not an extensible system. I need to sit down one weekend, completely hack out the Tabulas platform then convert Tabulas to the new system so I don't have to develop for two similar systems (Tabulas platform and Tabulas.com).

Tabulas Features/Bugs

Well, I still have this long list of stuff to do for Tabulas in terms of features

Tabulas Radio

I've been working on the Tabulas Radio backend. I don't quite have the money to move the frontend radio system to something else, but that doesn't mean I can't work on the backend. Here's what I've decided to do with Tabulas Radio.

Paid users can create a "repository" of streaming music on their Tabulas accounts (probably ~64 tracks per paid account). Users can then create playlists from their repositories (or they can just choose their whole repository as one playlist) and then publish these playlists to their radio. Visitors can then select a playlist of streaming music to listen to ...

I'm going to also develop a separate radio user directory (paid users only) that lets people find all Tabulas Radio accounts.

Supporting other languages

I've recently inked out a verbal agreement with someone in Brazil for them to run tabulas.com.br. It will be a Brazillian port of Tabulas; the whole site will be run in Portugeuse. The partner will handle payment and I will continue new feature developments/server management. This is mostly an experiment to me; I get to find a reason to refactor most of the control panel (as I've already had to above) to support other language files.

I'm hoping the Brazillian user becomes the 'Roy' equivalent ... we've decided to drastically cut prices on Tabulas Brazil user paid accounts. Hopefully if this works out, some enterprising Tabulas member from the Phillipines would be willing to be that Tabulas Phillipines partner? ;)

In any case, what I've decided to do technically is add in a field to each user's data that defines their language. Depending on their language, they will be redirected to their localized homepage (tabulas.com.br or tabulas.com). All data (even for all intl sites) will be stored in one database (so you can still make friends across borders). I guess essentially all your language settings do is redirect you to your language site (www.tabulas.com.br or my.tabulas.com.br or help.tabulas.com.br).

One of my big worries is the weird lack of language support in mySQL and outputting it. I'm currently using a mishmash of UTF-8 and iso-8859-1 (yeah, I know, I'm a moron, but I'm still learning!) ... I'll have to look into this.

Tabulas API and Syndication

Only the primary RSS feed is working for Tabulas right now; I'm in the process of re-adding category and community RSS feeds. OPML files were also temporarily disabled, but those should return shortly. I'm going to add RSS support to the gallery-level so people can see when you update images. On top of that, I'll add in a monster RSS feed which will combine all the aspects above if you want to track all changes to a particular Tabulas account.

I've been working with Borst (or rather, I've been haggling him) to get the Tabulas Uploader [a windows client that lets you upload images to your gallery via drag and drop]. This has been an interesting experience in client-server communication ... something I have no experience in. We're rather crude about it ... we're just using simple POST to send the data; I'm returning data in a very very simple XML format for Borst to parse.

Extending crossposting

Although time is lacking, I've been thinking about how COOL it would be to capture the entry ID# from LJ, Xanga, DJ whenever you crosspost; it would be real cool to link each entry to a certain crossposted entry; so for example when you edited a post you crossposted to LJ, it would edit that post automatically. I haven't given this too much look-see yet, but I know this is technically possible with LJ and LJ clones with their API. The main problem is if Xanga ever returns the UID when you post; if it does then I could just continue emulating an edit and delete post.

It would also be nice if Tabulas auto-converted tags to LJ tags when posting to LJ/DJ. (Idea from here).

Yeah, so that's what I've been up to.