Well, I upgraded all of the sites that are based off of Community Server, including http://topwebcomics.com http://h2ohq.com, http://dndorks.com, as well as of course, this one.  It caused some snags here and there, because the Community Server people changed some of the basics of how things work, but its supposed to be the last time they make major changes I believe to how things work.  From here on out, Community Server updates should mostly be either new things, bug fixes, or moving things around, which should lesson my work considerably when implimenting future updates.  One thing that worries me is that the quickreply box inherits from something called the templatedwebcontrol, which now has comments saying it is an obselete control and will be removed in a future version of Community Server.

Hopefully by the time they remove it, they will have implimented their own quickreply, which will mean I won't have to modify the source code to get ours to work.  Otherwise I'll actually have to redo the quickreply using the new framework.  As it was, I mostly copied and pasted the old code into the new site, made a few changes wherever it said some function didn't exist, and viola, it worked!

I haven't done much on TWC, I want to impliment user reviews (I worry about nasty reviews, but I'll probably make reviews have to be approved before being shown by a moderator), a news system that would pull from Webcomic.net, and start on this framework for hosted webcomics that Ry mentions every once in a while, but I've just been really stressed by my work on H2O. 

It seems the longer I work on H2O City Magazines, the larger in scope it becomes, and lately I've become paranoid about server resources.  We have a 2Ghz Xeon processor with 2GB of RAM, which should be able to handle what we're doing, but every once in a while, MSN, Google, or Yahoo pounds H2O City Magazines so hard with its 3+ million pages that it nearly drowns the server in requests.  The sites are using dramatically less resources now, which makes me feel better, but I've spent so much time working on server resource usage that I haven't implimented half of the new features I want to.  All of which means that my company isn't making as much money as I'd like, which results in me being more stressed out about my work, which leaves me less quality programming time for TWC.  :(

Anyway, we're starting a mail marketing program soon, hopefully that will get us some results, and I can start working on the "fun" sites some more, such as the dice roller for Webcomic.net, the character database for Dndorks.com, and lots of niftiness for TWC.

 

For now, we're preparing for the long drive to LA to attend a friend's wedding.  I thought my roommate was going to prepare everything, as he is much more in contact with my friend Ron.  Months turned into weeks, weeks turned into days, and yesterday I realized that we still don't have hotel reservations and my roommate is the only person with the information (we didn't even know which city we were going to!).  So I asked him for the info, and booked a reservation for today, 1 day notice. :(  90 bucks a room.  The sad reality is that even with several weeks notice, it still probably would have been about the same, though maybe one of the cheaper hotels would have had space, but I'd like to think it might have been cheaper if we had reserved it a while ago.

I'm going to bring a drawing pad and try sketching out some of the screens for the online applications I want to work on, but overall, I'm going to be losing quite a bit of work, we're driving tonight, staying in the hotel, going to the wedding tomorrow morning, then driving back.  If I had more time and/or money, we'd hit disney land (our hotel is only going to be 3 miles away from Disneyland, since it was relatively close to the church where the wedding is being held).  In reality, we probably should have just left at 5am tomorrow morning, gotten there for the wedding, and driven home, its kind of a waste to spend 200 bucks for 2 hotel rooms just so we will be rested tomorrow. :(  And with 4 people, and 4 hours each way, we could have alternated and it wouldn't have been too bad...  Dang, wish I had posted this earlier in the week, would have thought about that before. :(  Of course, then I wouldn't have been posting a lot of the same things, because I wouldn't have posted about only getting the reservations a day before, so may not have thought about it.