My interviews all seemed to go pretty well last week. For the most part, they were pretty similar. They all had basic questions about some of my past projects, some questions about what I’m good at, and then a coding question or two.

The interview that actually went the best was on Thursday with a company called Business Logic. That interview went about as good as I could have exptected. Hopefully the others went as well as I thought, too.

There’s some new features since last time.  Now it’s all AJAX.  Most of the things I do lately are AJAX, cuz it’s spiffy.  So here’s how it works..  You type in your info, hit “Shout!” and your browser goes to work.  It posts the shout and shows it on your page without reloading the page.  The really fancy feature, though, is that other people’s shouts will show up in real time automagically on your page.  That’s right.  If you’re viewing Shouzer, and I leave a shout, it’ll update on your page.  Now that’s just sweet.

In other site news, there’s a new version (version 3.0, actually) of myPad. I decided to go straight from 2.0 to 3.0, because I rewrote the entire thing. It should be quicker now and there’s a fancy little “loading” image you’ll see when it’s pulling data from the server. We’re fancy now.

I haven’t been doing anything overly exciting lately–mainly just going to work and then lazing around at home. I really don’t have any complaints about that. To me, it’s a good time. We played some Halo last night, which was pretty fun. Scott and Nick were both there and that was the first time I’d seen them over break, which was nice.

Damn, I really don’t have much to say..

You can check it out here. I’ve separated the different pages into their relevant folders. I’m planning to put up an actual page with descriptions and such for everything there. Right now, though, here’s a quick summary.

Back in 1999, Kyle and I had the idea to create a website. It was going to be what was then called an E/N site, or everything/nothing site. This is more or less the precursor to weblogs, now known more commonly as blogs. In that regard, we were pretty far ahead of the curve.

We’d both had a couple of other sites on the internet back then, which were more or less your typical homepages. I doubt most people even have what you would have considered a homepage nowadays. This was our first venture working together though.

One day in class, Kyle thought of the name ‘Shouzer’. I have no idea how or why, but it was original and it stuck. We were so confident that we would one day own shouzer.com, that the original sites were names shouzer.com, even though they were actually hosted at shouzer.virtualave.net. There was no ‘.com’ about it. In the shouzer.com folder, they’re layouts 1 & 2. Looking back, I’m still extremely impressed by layout 1. Like I said, this was over 5 years ago. That would have made me about 14-15. That was skill.

After the second layout, we split up for some reason and created separate sites. I don’t know why, really, but we did. The result was two sites called Blatantly (mine, short for blatantly arrogant and biased) and Plugworthy (Kyle’s, as it was worth a plug). The progression of Blatantly can be seen in the folder. It was about this time that I also created the Shouzer Network, or Shouzernet for short. The screenshot of that page can be seen in the ‘other’ folder.

After a year or so, we decided to get back together and create The DKS Weblog. While I kept posting on Blatantly for a little while after that, it was more or less the end of that site for me. Like when we split, I can’t really remember why we decided to start blogging together again, but we did. That site lasted a good while. I believe it was somewhere in the range of September 2000 to January 2003, and I had a lot of fun with it during that time. I remember there being a couple months when the site was down while I redesigned it, but I can’t remember either why it was down or for how long exactly. Maybe Kyle could remember that a little better.

It was in February 2003 that I purchased the domain for Shouzer, but the ‘hellsing’ coming soon was up forever. The first post I have in the database from the site was in November 2003. So it obviously took a while to get the site up and running. This was likely a result of my laziness, mixed with the fact that it took a rewrite of the blogging software we used. The real Shouzer.com was my first ever experience with a database, so it took some getting used to. It was also my first time ever creating an entire layout from only CSS. It was also the end of my senior year in high school. Suffice it to say, there were a lot of things going on keeping me from finishing the site.

Since then, the site has gone through a few changes, but not much. The site went through 3 layout changes, and then I migrated the DB and software over to WordPress, which required us to use WordPress themes for the layouts. I haven’t had the time or motivation to create my own layout yet, but I’m hoping it’ll happen sometime next semester. The biggest thing I regret is that the WordPress-based site doesn’t use shouts like the old site used to. Shouts were a system that let anybody post anything to a thin column on the side of the page. It was a nice way for friends to keep us updated with their lives even if they don’t have accounts to post on the main site. I liked shouts a lot.

Wow, this turned out to be a monster post. I ended up writing a lot more than I planned to, and I only scratched the surface. I guess I care about this site, and its beginnings, quite a bit.

[Edit:] I got rid of the ‘other’ folder and just put all the files in the main folder. It seems to make sense from a hierarchical perspective.

BTW, yes I know it steals a lot from Gmail–I obviously could never deny that. But the code is all mine, and no one could deny that Google has some pretty good ideas.

Oh, and right now you can’t remove a label from a note. I’ll get that added over the weekend, most likely.

[Edit:] Fixed a couple small bugs. There was a problem for new users, I got it displaying line breaks properly, and there was a backend thing you wouldn’t notice. I didn’t even update the version.

Jordan Timmermann
Derrick Wright

Both are obviously works in progress, but traffic never hurt.