And on Another Track

I have no blog entries left in my publishing queue, and I have no software ready to publish. No real news of any sort. Rather than just post another "I'm busy" post, I thought maybe I should fill everybody in on what exactly is eating my time up these days.

The highlights:

• Remedy 7.0
• vBulletin
• The Beast
• Related Links
• StopMomStop
• Crystal Reports
• Remedy Blackberry Integrations

I'm currently working on a Remedy 7.0 implementation - mainly to gain a real understanding of how the new software compares with existing versions and to identify problems associated with upgrades and migrations from previous versions. I've achieved "expert" status in the Remedy world - mainly because it's been my livelihood for at least the last decade - so inevitably my past clients are going to want me to be able to answer a lot of questions about it. The latest and greatest interface is significantly different than previous versions and I think it really is the first release that highlights the differences between Magic and Remedy. I've seen a lot of the marketing materials, and I've been privy to a few pre-release versions, but there's nothing like playing with the actual software.

Aside from that, I'm working on getting a messageboard set up for a new web site. For some reason I can't just go with an out of the box implementation. Some of that has to do with the fact that the community I'm targetting has an existing set of expectations as far as a message board is concerned, but a lot has to do with the fact that I just have an intrinsic need to understand software at a certain level before I release it - and gaining an understanding means that I will feed myself further requirements.

I'm also still working on a sitemap generation utility that has turned into a BEAST. The more I work on it, the more concerned I get about the functionality involved. I don't just want to kick out an XML file - which is what most sitemap generation utilities do, I want micromanagement control over what is produced and information that will help me make those micromanagement decisions. I've re-written the thing from scratch probably 7 times now to take into account performance issues that will enable usage on very large sites, and I'm also spinning off several sub-utilities based on that code base - some for personal usage and some for the public.

One of those spinoff utilities is a related links manager that should be available as an MT plugin that will allow for relation of links internal to the site, external to the site, and categorized as necessary. Something similar to what I have at bkweddings.com, but much more manageable as that was a hack from the beginning. It will also be available for use outside MT, I'm hoping in both Perl and PHP versions. Another spinoff would be my syntax highlighter plugin which I've been reluctant to release because there are a couple of bugs in it and a few management tasks I'd like to clear out first.

And then comes the question of - how do I support all this software? I've been leaning towards picking up yet another vB license for stevekallestad.com so that I can have a support system in place before I release anything. I just don't want to have to try to manage multiple message board platforms and spend time hacking them so that they provide the same basic set of management capability that I require.

I'm also working hard to get everything squared away for stopmomstop.com - everything from privacy policy information to a basic set of information for initial launch to community interactivity capabilities. And then there's the entire planning process in regards to site promotion, SEO, management, etc.

Of course, what is my life if there isn't some sort of crystal report something happening in the background. Crystal is a platform that I despise as much as a person could despise a piece of softawre, but for some reason I'm more productive with it than most people I've worked with. I just produced a report that takes up a 92" page layout! It was actually a pretty simple report structurally, but that's not to say that it was a task that didn't consume much more time than I would have liked, and of course when creating a report that generates that much data, you have to stop and say "is this going to be useful at all?!?" - I have my doubts, but apparently it is being used by at least a couple of people (or maybe that's just what they would like me to believe:) ) and I haven't heard any complaints yet.

Another major thing I'm working on is a Blackberry integration system with Remedy. I've done this several times in the past, but what I'm working on now is an extensive system that can be extended easily, managed within a simple interface, over-documented, high performance, and simple to use from an end user perspective. Oh, and did I mention that it needs to support 9 different flavors of unix, a couple of windows platforms, several databases, and multiple versions of remedy? Not a problem :)

So that's why I've run out of articles in my queue, and why I'm a little bit behind in releasing anything. It's all coming down the road soon enough, but with everything I serve up on my own plate, it is extremely important that my family does not get back burnered.