Okay, so WOAY didn't launch yesterday.  That's the speed of business.  Fortunately, they did launch today, and the phones were buzzing almost three times an hour.  Ah, a typical launch!

So, I've gotten most of that website buttoned up, meaning that there are a few minor glitchy parts that I need to visit (the search button overriding everything for a start) but it's pretty much up to snuff as far as I'm concerned.  Considering that I'm up to my eyes in work from other sources (that will remain nameless and unknown until such a time as it's too late) it's likely that it will be awhile before I get around to fixing minor glitches.  In any case, there are greater problems to be crushed!

For instance, implementing a git source control repository on Windows 2003 server so that Jeff and I don't go completely insane trying to manages merges of code through the file system, not to mention the organization of older codefiles that such a repository brings.

But I guess my biggest problem at the moment is arguing the merits of Free Software in a Microsoft centric, the more you pay the better it is, crowd.  For some things, I could see paying out the nose for solutions that involve project management or libraries.  I even think that .NET is a decent platform.  However, when I see the things that people do with languages like Python, Ruby, Perl, and, dare I say it, PHP, it makes me wonder how I strayed so far from that path.  And I sometimes wish that I hadn't.

Sure, .NET has its share of open source projects.  DotNetNuke, mojoPortal, BlogEngine.NET (which runs this site), and others that may or may not be related to the web stand as proof.  But given the three projects I mentioned by name, the most straightforwardly customizable one among them is BlogEngine.NET, and its default theme leaves much to be desired on that front, cramming everything into a single CSS file without any guide to what its controls actually use and where styling for the theme itself begins.  mojoPortal is a complete nightmare to use in such a context, and DotNetNuke doesn't win any favors from me.  There are others, but they are open source in a very loose sense, and I have no experience with them.  May not be a fair assessment, but there it is.

With any luck there will be greater improvements on these systems and frameworks (such as ASP.NET MVC, which has greatly sparked my interest), though it will take some time.  Though I fear it may take too much given the rapid evolution of the other platforms due to their respective communities.  Well, not so much PHP. 

It might be a bit premature, but that website has taken forever.  Not for want of getting it done, but just because the contract was overly ambitious.  Everything that we thought we could use, that we already had built, needed to be rewritten from almost the ground up.  News, event calendar, and generic page handling were all affected and doesn't include the entirely new items that needed to be added.  We went from a simple CMS to a nearly complete portal in 6 months.

That might not sound bad to you, but our normal development turn-around is more like ONE month.  So, the project is over budget.  Extremely over budget.  However, I'd like to think we come away with a few pluses.

1. We now have an acutal user management system for our websites.
2. I now have eye-candy to put in my portfolio.
3. It's a website I actually have no fear of saying "It's mine."
4. We can resell the basic system, thus giving us the opportunity to eat into the competition.

I can personally live with this arrangement.  The website isn't scheduled to go live until Monday (March 1, 2010), but you can check it out at:  http://www.woay.com/default.aspx