Whew, what a day! I've been elbow-deep in a fairly substantial refactor of a portion FurBuy's code for most of the day. This is basically a "I did it wrong the first time around, and it needs to be fixed to move forward" kind of issue. I've known about this problem for a few years now, but the more work I've done with FurBuy the more I've realized this is becoming more and more critical. The refactor means the site will run FASTER and MORE SMOOTHLY, but also allows us to extend some of the site features a lot farther, a lot faster, and in a more automated fashion.

Basically ya know those Remote Site Usernames we allow you to set in FurBuy? Right now all of them are HARD-CODED into the system, which is -very- bad juju. It means that in order to add any new remote site links to ANY of the sites we run, it was a code update to about a dozen major scripts and pages on the site - whatta pain in the arse! So this refactor is turning all of those into a database-driven set of tables and relationships while also optimizing the serving of that data by caching it to disk on our system (less DB hits = more speed).

What this also means is that we can now EASILY add new remote sites - YAY! =D And those of you who follow me instead of  furbuy get an advanced heads-up: we're FINALLY linking to InkBunny! In addition we're adding Facebook, Twitter and looking into various IM possibilities as well! I'm hoping to have this new system in place and all of the users' data converted to it this weekend, fingers crossed!

P.S. If you have any ideas for other sites we should add linking to, please let us know! I can't say that I'm personally the most up to date on various furry social networking sites, or even non-furry sites that people frequent, so feedback and input is appreciated. =) Thanks!