It's been a couple of months since I finally decided that it was time for a full overhaul of kevinludlow.com and there have been some pretty significant changes already made to the architecture of the site. I was joking to DaveG just a couple of days ago how significantly my CMS architecture skills have improved since I first developed the concept back in 2005, and even since formally releasing it in 2007.
The size of the codebase has been significantly reduced and puts much more strain on the SQL server for larger, more complex operations (as opposed to parsing data via code after simple queries). Additionally, most all of the original Javascript used has been replaced with jQuery or removed entirely. While I'm thrilled to have done this, it's not entirely an original design flaw. When I first began coding the system, the jQuery library was not yet available and developers were essentially limited to the Prototype / Scriptaculous packages. To this day I contend that those packages are hugely bloated and should not be used for web development projects given the complexities that they add to the maintenance of projects. This was especially the case in 2007 when I first released openFace given processors were that much slower and front-end Javascript weighs a browser down. Fortunately jQuery provides an excellent balance of functionality and programmability while still remaining pretty light (provided one avoids their various UI packages).
In parallel to this development (which is really just in my spare time), I have been hiring people to take on the arduous tasks of scanning photos, digitizing movies, digitizing old audio recordings, and etc. As of this writing I already have 11,254 new photos that will be added to the website once it is fully launched, though I'm guessing it will be closer to 17,000 new photos once I'm finished!
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