Blog of Dave

In the past 7 months, Aaron and I have completely rewritten InstantSpot from bottom to top.   It was a much more clear and direct path than when we started with the original version in 06.  In fact, we never even planned on networking the sites together in the first place, and adding blogs to them was an afterthought, which is hard to believe in hindsight!

Around the beginning of summer 07 we decided to step back and evaluate, which lead to a rewrite of the entire application.  We originally thought about replacing pieces here and there, but pretty quickly realized that it would be much smarter to start with a blank slate, now that we actually know where we are and where we are going, and could take advantage of all the things we have learned since we started.  It has been a *huge* job, and I think we can pretty easily say that we have more development time put into version 2 than we did in version 1.

We are trying some interesting stuff with this version in all areas, from the decision to use Railo as our CFML engine, opening up XMLRPC for desktop blogging, in place editting on blogs, much broader friend/networking support, and lots of ajax around the edges primarily using Jquery.  And, for those that have always hated the blog comment activation -a couple of names stick out in my head at the moment! :) - we have retooled that process.  Now, if you are not an InstantSpot member, you will be prompted to confirm your email address *1 TIME ONLY* across the entire network.  From then on, you will not have to activate on each comment.  For instance, if you comment on my blog and validate your email address, you can hop over to Aaron's blog and leave comments on his which are automatically activated.  (and check out the ajax stuff in that process!)

With all of that said, I expect to be blogging about our experience of the new server and migration in the next few days.  We feel like we have been meticulous with our planning, but we all know that sometime surprises happen.  We will be making the DNS change tonight and migrating all the production data.  Our DNS TTL is an hour, so for many people the change will show up almost immediately.

If you are an InstantSpot user and want to see a preview of what your site will look like today before the switch, shoot me an email at dshuck+instantspotpreview@gmail.com and I will give you instructions.

One last item - Today is the last day of open enrollment to InstantSpot as we will be going to an invitation-only model on the new version.  If you want to go create a Spot, now might be a good time.

Now... we have our fingers crossed for a smooth migration.  Wish us luck!