A Little Site Update

Last week was a busy week behind the scenes at DIYcity, and hence a slow week on the site itself, so I wanted to give a quick update on the site for all.

First, you may have noticed that the right nav has changed a bit. We now have links to a centralized "Challenges" page, a centralized "Projects" page and a centralized "Specs" page (as well as a centralized "releases" page which isn't active yet). This is all reflective of the way in which DIYcity is evolving from a place where random conversations happen and go nowhere, to a place where focused conversations happen and lead to actual product that communities can use. This is pretty exciting, but it's also still pretty early in this evolution, so there's not a whole lot to look at yet there. I'll post more on this idea before too long.

Then, lots of work was done last week on the first DIYcity project, outlined here, and the people involved are getting very close to a 1.0 release. Exciting. Hopefully more news on that this week.

Next, a lot of what has been happening with this 1.0 project has really just involved nailing down the basic design philosophy that should guide DIYcity development - questions like "should this app live on one central server for every community, or should communities all set it up individually on their own servers?" It's an interesting discussion and I'd like everyone who wants to chime in on it. I'll post what we've got to the wiki in a bit and invite additions/subtractions/comments. Getting to a good, common understanding of a design philosophy seems like a big step toward getting DIYcity going as a real place for development and change.

Lastly, you may have noticed a lot of test emails coming in over the weekend. We're still trying to wrangle with that mysql/php bug that happens whenever someone posts to a group with lots of members. No solutions yet, short of moving to a dedicated server. Remember for now: if you post a new message to the site and see garbled mysql errors, DON'T repost - your post went through just fine.

Okay, now on with the show!

John