what i've been up to

Thursday, July 08, 2004, at 07:09PM

By Eric Richardson

Over the past weeks I've been working on a complete rewrite of eThreads, my forever in progress piece of forum/blog/who-knows software. I posted a bit of a brief history a couple years ago, but I don't think it really does a good job of summing up exactly how long I've been doing this. Let's take a look at codebase versions (not releases, but major changes in the architecture):

April 21, 1998

This is the oldest recorded date in the eThreads revision log. It was actually the third check-in (version 1.3 of common.pl), since I didn't have any RCS tags (yeah, my pre-CVS days) in the initial checkins. Most likely, though, that inital checkin was on or right around this same date. I'm not sure exactly when development began, though.

June 09, 1998

This is the oldest remaining snapshot of the eThreads code, and can be found in http://old.ethreads.com/src/archive/devel/old/. Tonight I actually took a little bit of time to recreate some database syntax and get a bit of that old code running. You can see the resulting test forum here. It's not much to look at, and none of the stuff that requires logging in will work, but I'm kind of amazed it runs at all.

July 14, 1998

This is the date of the first checkin log entry I have for the eThreadsII codebase. It's version 1.4 of shared-code, so the real start must have come a bit earlier. This version gets rid of the crazy BASIC-style syntax=? navigation and brings in the new (and current) /script/function/forum/ style URLs.

September 19, 1998

I use strict; for the first time.

January 20, 1999

First checkin of the shell that will become the new eThreadsIII codebase.

April 18, 1999

This blog post was the first time eThreads was used on this site. Previously I had been using a little app I called eNews.

July 14, 2000

eThreads 1.2 was released. This has been the last major eThreads release for what is it now? four years? Ouch.

August 10, 2001

eTevolution branched off from the eThreadsIII codebase. The eThreadsIII code subsequently died, aside from little bug-fixes, so it was more just a change in direction than a real branch. Oh well.

July 31, 2003

mod_perl_safe branch began in an effort to get a much needed speed boost. Though it never technically merged back into the main branch, this was where all development was. On August 8, 2003, I moved this site over to the newly mod_perl friendly code.

May 14, 2004

First checkin of eTrevolution core. This is a ground-up rewrite designed around mod_perl and a very OO interface.

So it's been six years now, I've released a couple versions, and I'm been promising 2.0 since 2002. I think I'm right on track.