Intrablogs and cleaning cruft
I'm getting inspired by the work I'm doing at work to get off my ass on my own server projects. Both this site and Mobitopia desperately need an update, and I've been thinking about swapping over to Tomcat 5, and upgrading to MySQL 4, and just generally making an effort to get everything in better shape than it is right now. Because even though the site may look pretty clean, behind the scenes it's just a complete fucking disaster.
The Mobitopians in particular have been bitching for months now about the "refresh problem" which affects posting and reading and RSS updates. And I'm using 2 different versions of the same code base for Mobi and this site, which means when I fix a bug in one place it does nothing for the other set of code, etc. I need to shape up what I have and relaunch both sites (and maybe some more) with much cleaner code and directory structure, etc. All while maintaining permalinks and not pissing off Google too much.
I'm realizing this now as I just copied the Mobitopian codebase - which allows multiple authors - for an "Intrablog" at work. The idea is to set up an internal weblog with links, etc. that any employee can post to, and encourage everyone to set that up as their home page. With permalinks and comments, it becomes a pretty good bulletin board and communication device. Rather than trying to use email hell or various discussion groups (which, with the size of the company wouldn't be particularly good), we can use the weblog instead. We'll see how it goes, but I feel that after working with the Mobitopians via the weblog and IRC, it's actually a very good way to coordinate and produce something interesting. That's going to be my next project when I get a free moment - an internal IRC server, maybe outside the firewall with password support. Almost everyone has a S60 phone, so with Wireless IRC it'd rock.
Anyways, getting that code up on the server at work was like, I don't know, sorting through an old photo album. "I wore those glasses back then? WHY?" I haven't spent that much time with that old code in so long... Urgh, it's ugly. Time to throw out the plaid shorts and clean up the cruft on my server.
-Russ