Practise, practise, practise.
I've been out of it too long. I need practise. And working here on the user-interface is all well and good, but I still need something for the hours I'm not sleeping. So enter 'UserBoard' (okay, lame name, but it's exactly what it is.)
I've been a member of a couple of Play-By-Email games for some time now, and up to a couple of weeks ago all was peachy. But now rumors of our ListGroup server going commercial (I won't say names, but it starts with a 'Y' and ends in '!'...) and us having to pay for their services has made me decide to look at other angles.
And I'm a programmer, so what angle do I look at? Right: Making my own server. And not only that, but writing my own server from scratch.
Sure, I've looked at all the available ListServers out there, but they don't do it for me. That and the fact that I just need something to make.
So, I've begun UserBoard, and I've decided to take a marginally different approach to the other's I've found, and that is to concentrate on the web-interface from the start, and assume (as is the case right now for the groups I know) that nobody uses the e-mail commands to do their administration.
And version 1 will be just that: a first version, to be improved on (or totally rewritten) as needs be.
So, I've set up the SourceForge group (UserBoard) and am writing a first draft of the functional design as a guidebook how I think it should look at the end...
Wish me luck!
