Gallons of Midnight Oil

We did skip a week of blogging, so here’s what we’ve been working on behind-the-scenes.

On the Knowledge Base, we’ve continued the migration of hundreds (almost a thousand) phones onto the new Phones Section of the Knowledge Base. And while having two names may seem a bit awkward, the final layout of the new Knowledge Base will have two areas: Phones Section and Carrier Info. Essentially, the wiki will be broken into those two areas, so you’ll be able to get, share, and contribute the best information about every carrier in America, as well as every phone that works in America. It’s taking a lot of work, countless hours of data entry, and we’re still nowhere near done. But, we’re putting all our free time into it.

And, you may have already noticed some of the transition. We’ve already migrated several manufacturers completely over to the new layout. Old links still work, and will redirect to the new pages. So, if you browse around for a few minutes… you’ll probably see the changes. Of course, you can just cheat and Browse Recent Changes… but where’s the fun in that?

Let’s talk servers. We’re setting up a test-type server which will essentially automatically mirror PhoneNews.com. This is great news, because we’ll be able to test updates and code on-the-fly. The benefit? No downtime to deploy updates. Everything will be tested, and if it crashes the test server… a click of the mouse resets it. This is in addition to our daily site-wide backups, which we already could fall back on if something went wrong.

We’re also gearing up for a change of hosting providers. This will cut costs somewhere between 75 to 90% of what we’re paying right now, and preliminary testing shows we’ll actually get a speed boost from the switch.

Finally, we’re starting work on a new layout for PhoneNews.com. We were planning to hold off on this for Joomla 1.5. However, what is more likely to happen is that we will deploy a new layout in mid-August. We don’t know when we will be able to fully deploy Joomla 1.5, and we want a new layout that reflects the success of PhoneNews.com. We’re working to make it consistent, and site-wide (News, Forums, Blog, and Knowledge Base).

What else? Well, we’re just getting started on finalizing WAP support, and the rest… well, we don’t want to spill spill the beans on what we’re working on.