Ah, the fresh smell of a new launch

My buddy Reid and I have launched our 100% from scratch forum! ( http://forum.starmen.net/forum ) Admittedly, it sounds like a silly idea since we basically reinvented the wheel, but we had a unique problem space involving tons of custom code. Things I learned over the course of this:

* Testing is awesome. I didn't understand the reason to test what I just programmed to work. When it got to the point that 50% of my bugs were regressions I buckled up and started test casing everything.

* Since our forum uses Textile, users can implement their own CSS. Originally I threw in RedCloth and called it a day. My white hat friend originally had a problem since it didn't even check for quotation marks escaping. Then all sorts of (mostly IE6) XSS attacks using weird CSS. My favorite was an attack through color:. (CSS is now strictly parsed.)

* Converting old data is a real pain, but there's all kinds of rewards to see old messages from 2003 along with newer ones. However, the day-long downtime could've been prevented. ("ROFISH's Epic Nap" has already found it's way into the site lore :/)

* Reid wanted to escape the bounds of traditional table based layouts. Our design has been met with 'meh okay' at best, but hostility as it's worst. One should always give people what they expect.

Next week is a much earned vacation! Then it's time to work on the main site. (If you're interested in more, check out our woefully under updated blog: http://fangamer.com/blog/about/ )