Earlier this week Ben who's done the vast majority of the development work on this site left for a 3 week long vacation to Germany.  Instead of letting things stagnate, he handed off the keys to me and I will try to pick up on development while he's gone.  Should be interesting... 

While I've done most of the design work, I've only really poked around with the coding side of things.  In fact I've never written anything before in the technology (Ruby on Rails) that this site is built on.  After about a week of playing with stuff, things don't look to bad, and I'll have some new features coming down the pipe pretty quickly.  

I spent most of this week working on performance/stability of the site.  The site appears to have gotten significantly faster (1/4 of the load on the servers, same # of users)  Hopefully after I put the next batch of changes up, the 500 errors users have seen under high load should be a thing of the past.  I also made some changes that I hope should really improve how search engines index and rank the pages on this site.  It will be a few weeks until we know how successful those have been.  A lot of this involves how we display tags for blog posts, if you haven't seen the new method try clicking on a tag.

Next I'll take another try at getting the really cool blog/profile searching back up again.  We had put it up about a week ago, but had to disable it soon after because it caused our servers to crash.  Then back to work on targeting content at consumers...

Ben's baby may look a little different by the time he gets back :)