A Flurry of Features

I am not getting much sleep this week. We have been implementing a bunch of new features. I implemented sessions so that I could provide a history of the kounts viewed and created by the user. This should make it easier for people who want to return to the site periodically to increment their kount.

I have been holding off on doing any new features that required changing the data model. I just didn’t think I had the right tools in place yet. We wanted to add the ability to have a kountdown. This had been requested 3 times by users. Antoinette had this awesome idea. Rather then having a bit in the data model to indicate which direction the kount was going we could do it without changes to the data model. We let the user set the initial value of the kount. We then store the negative of this number. But when we display the value of the kount, we show the absolute value.

abs( -x + 1 ) = x - 1

When it reaches 0 it will bounce back up. Not a big deal because the user is just trying to get to 0. I like this solution because it was the absolute bare minimum required to meet the customer request. In the future if the feature is worthwhile we can always do a cleaner implementation.

Finally, I got a request today to include a timestamp on the kounts so that people can know when they were created. This requires a data model change, but it was painless.

I’ll write more about these all once I am done the critical stuff tonight.