EVILEG - Celebrate three years

EVILEG, 3 года

On June 28, the information resource of EVILEG was three years old. And it's time to take stock of what has been done, which has not been done due to various circumstances, among which the greatest percentage is the lack of time and laziness. And something was done outside the plan. And this is a pretty powerful functional introduction to the site. And also I would like to tell you about the plans for the next year.

The results of the accomplished annual work

I'll start with the dry figures, which will show how much the resource was able to grow and how the content of the site has changed qualitatively.

Site Users

The cool thing is that the site registered for the last year 620 users, I take into account only those who passed the activation of the account, against 311 for the previous two years. Just a little did not reach 1000.

Articles and comments

For the last year, 89 articles were published (347 articles were published on the site), of which 30 articles were added by users of the site. Some of the users took the initiative and published their own articles (I only tweaked the layout with the authorship preserved, the resource rules indicate that the administration of the resource can edit the article so that the style of the article does not get out of the general style of the site), but someone directly offered assistance in translating some news articles, one of them and I suggested writing articles on their developments, and they agreed.

I express my gratitude to them, here are our heroes:

• Dmitras
• MinusNull
• grip_p
• BlinCT
• OrdinaryMind
• alex_lip
• SERGRINA
• Bernar
• Ruslan
• Ilya_M

There is also an increase in commenting on articles, 584 comments for this year, and 197 for the previous two years.

Forum

The forum asked 303 questions and 1711 messages, against 279 questions and 1583 messages for the previous two years.

Testing

Unfortunately, I do not develop the testing section as actively as I would like, and at the moment there are only 7 tests on the site, but even for these tests, about a third of registered users passed testing (760 completed tests in total). This is cool, you will have to allocate time and write more tests.

Attendance

The site's attendance for the year has doubled. If a year ago, the average daily attendance on a weekday was around 600-650 unique visitors, but now on weekday attendance fluctuates around 1150-1350 unique visitors, depending on the holidays and the time of year, as well as the activity of the articles.

Django Engine

The Django engine has proved itself well. I started the development of the site from version 1.10 and at the moment it has been updated to version 2.0.6. Despite some unsolved problems in the third-party batteries to Django from the developers of these modules, all these problems were solved, or the community offered solutions to conflicts, or the developers themselves quickly solved compatibility problems with new versions of Django. And the updates were relatively painless.

Also I still use VDS-hosting TIMEWEB , which I recommend.

Site development

Finally, we managed to find the most established design of the site, which changed many times during the existence of the resource, including the RU domain, whose site is based on WordPress. Also in the earliest versions, I used the navigation drawer, which I refused, and now I'm back again using the Bootstrap 4 Material Design fork. At the moment, I think the design is well-established and finalize the logic of the site for the delivery of pages or parts of the pages of the site. For example, for pagination of content lists (forum for example) and search, it is already possible to retrieve parts of pages using Ajax, which somewhat reduces the load on the site feed, as well as rendering pages.

Sadly, it was not possible to make minor corrections, which were planned a year ago and that was attributed to the technical debt on the resource. So now it's time to collect the stones.

What was done?

• Improved website design
• The likes and dislays, bookmarks for simplifying the introduction of social activity functions for new types of content on the site without writing additional views and handlers have been revised. Everything is implemented on Generic functionality.
• Private messages on the site. Yes! It's done and it works! Of course, it is still poorly implemented, but it works.
• Additions to friends and the ability to leave the user in subscribers, done even a little more than planned!
• Added support for downloading content on the site using AJAX, pagination and search. This makes life easier for the server.
• A wall has been added, it was added spontaneously and beyond the planned functionality, however it works.
• The ability to add questions for users' tests has been added, though, no one uses it yet.

What needs to be done?

• Editing of comments and questions on the forum. Messages on the forum can already be edited, but editing of questions is not done, as well as comments on articles. We put a big fat minus, hangs since last year.
• Add subscriptions to the sections with testing, so that users can learn about the release of new tests. We put a minus, but not such a fat one, it's not so difficult to subscribe, but with increasing my own professional experience I can say that the notification system in principle is the time to allocate to a separate module and better qualify the distribution of messages, especially since FeedBurner has ceased to understand my RSS- tape, which is very strange, because Feed Validator considers it serviceable, in general all anonymous subscribers need to be transferred to their own mailing system on the site.
• Add support for hash tags for everything, seriously, the tags are already made better than they were a year ago, and also a search is made for tags. Now you can more easily enter a hash-tag system. That is, for a year the task was partially solved.
• Add the ability to add images inside messages and comments, and not just as attachments. Photo albums have not been implemented, but images for messages and comments are better done through the support of photo albums, so that each user has the opportunity to add their messages anywhere and anyway. The task was not carried out, but its presentation became better formed as an idea.
• Add the ability to see subscribers of sections of articles and forums to facilitate the interaction of users between each other, and add socialization to the site.
• At most, transfer the site to use AJAX to load content
• Translate the site to use Channels and Web Socket for private messages, possibly for some other functionality.
• Increase the number of tests on the site for the ability to add randomly generated tests. Although we put a minus, it was planned a year ago

Further plans for a new functionality

• Add a system of achivoks, according to the results of research in this direction, without the database caching it will be difficult to do, but there is already an idea of ​​how best to do this.
• The skill page, as in LinkedIn with the possibility of voting, did not come to grief for studying how this can be done, but thanks to the work with the likes and dislikes, there are developments in this direction that can allow this to be realized.
• From the possible functionality I see the addition of social bookmarking as a closed functionality of the site, which will be available only to registered users. In fact, it will be the ability to share links with the community and discuss the link data, it may be similar to reddit.
• Registration of companies on the site with the possibility of placing vacancies, as well as support for the resume for users of the site. Seriously, some users have already been able to find work through the site, and some employees. I think that this is a good idea.
• Remove CKEditor and completely go to your WYSIWYG editor.

Directions of articles

It so happened that I bought a new computer for writing a test task for one company ... yes yes yes ... I bought a new PC to perform a test task. So the stars agreed that it was time to update, and then the task was thrown, which required a new iron. The task was on Unreal Engine 4. I liked it. So maybe the appearance of articles on this engine. In the end, I plan to write my game in the future. And a series of articles about my amateurish research will be a great help. Also, I'm still part of Qt / C ++, so this topic will also evolve, as well as Django.

Also, if one of the users wants to write an article from an area that is not yet on the site, then always. With pleasure we will create a new section.

From a professional blog to a social network?

It's nice that the users of the site are becoming more active and I would very much like that more experienced users become more likely to help answers to newcomers on the site so that our community formed around the programming becomes more and more united and friendly, maybe even grow into a small professional social network.

Conclusion

Try not to delay what you plan for a year. By my example, I see that the technical duty of the site is slowly growing, but with the advent of the accidentally introduced functionality, there are more tasks that need to be realized, and in fact so want to relax, get distracted and just exercise nonsense. For example, it's summer now, and so you want to go somewhere on the weekend. For example, I want to go to Budapest, and it takes a whole day and, accordingly, I will not deal with the site. And then a working week, etc. A year flies quickly, so you need to take yourself in hand and do business, and do not waste time, so that then your program does not lie for two years in the form of unfinished sources with half-working functionality. Or divide your work into subtasks and return to it at least once every two weeks. Otherwise, the list will be reduced, and the list of what needs to be done will grow.

In fact, I am pleased with the progress of the site, since I managed to maintain the resource despite personal workload, which last year was indeed higher than in the previous year. And with such users, as in the community around the resource, it's nice to keep the site on and on.

Thank you for your attention to the site, Dear Users!