Thursday, June 25, 2009

New Look And Better Performance

I just pushed out a new version of PenWag last night with a new look. No sweeping changes, but wanted to get rid of the old-style navigation and clean some things up.

I also spent some time on rebuilding and tuning the reverse proxy for better memory usage (since the VPS max mem is 128M) and better connection handling. The performance is definitely much better now.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Teasers - Back To Adding Features

Well, now that the 1.5 to 1.6 upgrade is (mostly) behind me, it's back to adding features.

I've been meaning to get around to turning the story viewer into a scrollable pane. That was just changes to a line or two of code, so that's deployed to penwag.com.

Also, I've been talking to my son Taylor off and on about how to promote the site. He suggested adding a teaser to the main page, that people see part of a story, and can get a taste of what's inside. Perhaps they'll read the intro to a story, and be hooked enough to register and read the rest. Now that's built and deployed. Each time a user visits the site, it randomly picks from one of the stories I've marked as a candidate.

If you haven't come out to the site yet, have a look. It's in its infancy now, come and watch it grow!

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Upgrade from GWT 1.5 to GWT 1.6 - Again

Well, I wasn't satisfied with the result of the upgrade. Although sometimes I like to try the same thing again and see if the the outcome is different, this time I tried a different approach to see if the outcome was different.

The problem with a straightforward upgrade was the "danglers" from the 1.5 directory structure. During the conversion, it was hard to tell what could be thrown away and what needed to be kept without going through everything carefully.

So, I decided to created a new project, using the current tools, let it build exactly the directory structure it wants, then copy stuff in until it works. Basically. There was some moving around, there were changes to build.xml, and miscellaneous cleanup. But, all my UTs passed, all my ATs passed, and it's good to go.

I still need to swap out what's deprecated in the API for what's current, but that can happen later.

Also in the process, I switched repositories from Subversion to Git. Git takes us back to the command-line world that we had years back with CVS, but it's far-and-away better than the other repo options out there: Local branching, rebase, gitk, bisect, workflow smorgasbord, and more. Very nice. By following this workflow I can auto-collaborate and work on the same branch on my desktop or at the local Breadco.