July 17th, 2005
Adventure's Dawn is now officially live. It was a long road, and there
is much work still to be done. Let the adventures begin.
June 20th, 2005
If this site ever goes live, you all are going to laugh at me.
I started this website in March 2003, and here I am over 2 years later and I haven't
published it on the web. I have redesigned the site once again. The presentation layer looks
almost unchanged, but I've rewored the entire underlying system using
Ruby on Rails.
AD is so much cleaner now, you wouldn't hardly believe. Lots of new features, including tighter
integration with the phpBB forums, the ability for users to submit news items, and
a wonderful system for moderators/admins to manage the site (thus allowing us to
post the latest and greatest news and information for your consumption!). I've
recruited a few folks to help out with the testing, and hopefully we will go
live sometime in the near future.
For those who are curious, the site has 165 books and 21 authors.
It has been built using
Ruby,
Rails, and
MySQL. There are currently 247
lines of model code, 846 lines of controller code, 1700 lines of view code, and 126 lines of helpers.
July 10th, 2004
The site has now been completely reworked in Ruby,
and I have finished adding some of the features I wanted to have before
going live. In particular, I have integrated user sessions from the forums.
What does this mean exactly? In order to "register" with the site, you have
to register on the boards. However, you DO NOT have to register in order
to view the content of the site. Registering just allows you to track which
books you have read, as well as how you rate and review them. You can
still post reviews as "Anonymous." The most exciting
part about user profiles, I think, is the ability to see what other users have
to say about a particular book or author. For example, say the user "avid_reader"
LOVES author A, and so do you. You can click on their name, see what else
they have to say about other authors or books to give you an idea of what
other authors or books to read. Neat, huh? I have also spent some time adding
to the database. Right now, the site indexes 134 books from 17 authors. I
have also changed the news system to operate via a database, which allows me
to dynamically load author specific news items when browsing authors.
November 15th, 2003
I had stopped working on the site around June of 2003. I had gotten to a
point where it seemed all the fun stuff (site design) was complete, and all
I had left to do was all the busy work (researching books, publication dates,
type in synopsis information, etc.) With my first year of graduate school
just around the corner, there were other things I wanted to do before I lost
pretty much all my time to school.
So, here I was in November, and I was feeling the urge to complete the site
and publish it to the web. I decided to reimplement the site using eRuby
instead of PHP. It made things so much easier. I still have a lot
of busy work ahead of me, but I hope to have as much done as possible before
my second term of school begins.
March 20th, 2003
I started working on this page in March 2003.
I had become somewhat frustrated in my search for the latest news on my
favorite genre - epic fantasy. I would have to go to a different website
for each series. You may think I am lazy for not wanting to take the
extra effort in going to each of these sites. But why not have it all
in one place? I found myself looking up the information anyway, so why
not share my compilation with everyone else? I still go to all those
other sites (such as those listed in the
links
section) for more detailed information, because (at least at this
point), I don't intend on going into that much detail for each book,
series, or author. I hope to make this site a nice reference for people
looking for a good read, and a place to get the latest and greatest news
on those books and authors!
Orion
