Sweet Date

Sweet Date is a very straight-forward dating service web site. People sign up, browse and find people that interest them, and they can either send them an instant message or they can send them a message using the site's built-in mailing system.

As far as the look goes, I chose blue because I think it looks great and because I thought I'd try adhering to some standards for emotional targetting this time (e.g. Color Wheel Pro / Blue). Additionally, I'm taking my time with the feel of the site as I don't want it to have a "thrown-together" appearance. Instead, I want people to know intuitively how to use the web site and where to go if they need help.

The reason I'm able to pay attention to these elements is because I'm using Smarty Templating Engine again, which makes development go a lot faster. Now I can focus on jQuery and Photoshop.

While I'm very aware that dating web sites are a dime-a-dozen these days, I've always wanted to build one for several reasons:

1. Ads pay reasonably well
2. The structure is reasonably simple
3. I need more large-scale web sites on my resume

Although at the moment, the web site is currently being built, the basic frame is in place with the look & feel largely intact. Once registration is open, feel free to open an account but the site will be largely in beta until I feel it is relatively complete.

Sitdiary

Sitdiary started back in 2001 as a very simple idea: I wanted other people to be able to post blog entries about anything they wanted. What started as a small idea soon grew into a user-base of over 250,000, where at its peak had over 100 users online at any given time.

Time after time, the bandwidth wasn't enough for this "small" site and I was forced to continuously upgrade on a monthly basis. At one point, the cost became more than I could handle and that's when the popularity of the site started to take a downward turn.

As the site would be out of commission for days at a time, the user base soon dwindled down to around 50,000 and all of a sudden, bandwidth wasn't too much of an issue.

Of course, if I knew then what I know now, I would have done quite a few things differently. For one, I would've chosen a catchier name. Secondly, I would've added some serious caching to this site to reduce overall demand on files and database. Thirdly, I wouldn't have built the database in such a fashion. When I started building Sitdiary, I figured the best way to build the database would be to give each user their own tables for: entries (posts), comments and friends. While this might work well for a few thousand users, the method quickly degrades over time as it is an unnecessary waste of space. Fourthly, I would have added a payment plan for the really dedicated users to help pay for the bandwidth costs.

Since then, I've upgraded the database to a more standardized format and after testing the speed before and after, I can tell you that the standardized format is significantly faster. I've also added page caching using Smarty.

Overall, I'm glad Sitdiary is still running despite its bumpy and uncertain past.