bobbonew's blog

Well as i'm sure most of you guys who will read this blog already know, I finally launched my flagship questional.com on February 9th. Been in development with it since early November 2008, and I have dedicated about 8-12 hours a day on it. Now that it is finally released, I thought I would be able to breathe a breath of fresh air, but oh no there is so much more to do/think about. I knew that after release I would be the one responsible for keeping the server online, making updates, keeping security up to date, but its a lot more than I thought possible.

Our second day online I felt it necessary to get an IP Ban tool working, just in case we had attacks on the site. Well at night time, a team of a couple users decided to do just that, and unfortunately my ip ban tool was not the most efficient. I ended up working from 9 am to midnight, then having a 2.5 hour deletion fest with people wanting to take my site down. After it was over with, I was beat down to say the least. But the next day I was fully rejuvinized. I fixed the ip ban tool, as well as all ban tools overall, and enacted a few guest stipulations. Guests now have to wait 3 minutes between requests to the site; this encourages them to register as well as not being able to bot 9,000 things on my site in a matter of seconds. Overall the most crucial day of the project.

The following week was less eventful as that previous night malicious wise. Activity keeps increasing exponentially, and everyday more and more of our pages keep getting indexed by google. Its exciting to say the least. And to top it all off, participating on the site is actually addicting! On my off time (not that much mind you), participating on the site is fun, enjoyable, and open; I love it. Hopefully I have created something that will go viral, something people enjoy using, and something that promotes open knowledge and and an open mindset. Only time will tell.

I have much, much more planned for questional, and was hoping to keep this blog as an insight into the mind of a programmer. I can definitely say without fail that I now truly understand Redemption and some of the things he goes through. I already have amassed a to-do list that spans several months; its not as easy as you think to just push updates. I do try to work 12 hours a day still, I really wanna show that i'm working my face there and that if you want a feature you'll have it.

I'll try to keep this updated with the challenges I encounter and my personal story as a web developer/administrator/server admin.