YPNgine: Download

Sometime in 2003 I became the administrator of YPN. Not entirely sure why, but there it was. As all the other admins left, so went their involvement in the future engine of YPN, partyfish. For reasons I cannot remember, I too stopped development of partyfish even though it was near complete.

But, I didn't drop the idea of a new engine and leave YPN in the capable hands of sasq2 and phpBB. No, I began writing my own CMS: YPNgine. Even with just a handful of months of PHP experience, I'd tasked myself to create a multi-user CMS with various levels of administration, a document library and fully functional forum that needed, at least to the users, all the functionality of the old phpBB. No small task indeed.

But I pounded away at it no doubt learning many, many things along the way. I even opened it up to a public beta, though I cannot for the life of my think of where this was hosted (somewhere on an FSF server, no doubt).

Going through the changelog comments I left int the source files and performing a delta against the final post on this thread, YPNgine took somewhere in the range of two months to develop. I do remember quite keenly when I actually turned this thing live. The first week was nothing but bug reports and security issues. They all got squashed, but in the end between the issues and the requested features, I decided that the entire model I had built YPNgine around was unsustainable, but that's a story for a different day.

I am actually writing this post because I am releasing all of the source code from the last "build" of YPNgine to the public. You can use that link at the top, or download it here.

This was a request from some dude on deviantArt. I'll admit, I don't get the premise of characters turning into dolls (which there is a whole group dedicated to), but this piece proved an interesting challenge.

I used reference for the first stage (on the left) and made up the doll based upon that. Then, I had to essentially tween the middle image (in animator speak).

Created using my usual method of pencil, Illustrator and Photoshop.

Sometime in late 2002, I was welcomed on to the partyfish dev team. My first task: create the site wide search. Now, bear in mind that this was my first time really doing anything in PHP and search is quite a big thing. Ask Google. I'm pretty sure they'd back me up.

Today, some eight years later, I have implemented site search into my website. Of course, it's running circles around my original code in terms of complexity, speed and even the amount of lines it's implemented in (340 v 70).

Here are some of the fun things the new search can do:

• Searches through all content types and each type can display differently in search results
• All searches are weighted against where the terms were matched. The algorithm is such: (matches in title * 10) + (matched tags * 5) + matches in body
• As with all aspects of my site, the search has a RESTful interface so I could make an ajaxy instant search if I so desired

Here are some good queries to show off what it can do:

Rock Band - Example where weighting really helps Photoshop - Example of different document types

btw, if you wanted to see the old partyfish search code, here you go. The new search stuff will be added to the repository shortly and I'll be making that public very soon.

Well, here is the final installment of the 2010 anime review. Sadly, my bros are now college students and, given the have homework and what have you, you're left with mostly just my reviews. But, there it is.

Angel Beats

Angel Beats is a venture from many of the staff of Key, creators of Kanon, Air and Clannad. It follows the souls of a group of high school students who have died and are trapped in a sort of limbo, trying to find peace with their previous lives.

Matt - I'm a sucker for all things Key, so it should come as no surprise that I enjoyed Angel Beats. It has a good cast of characters and an interesting premise, with moments that can swing from plain ridiculous - any episode where they go to the Guild - to absolutely depressing - Yuri's back story comes to mind. The animation is top notch and the show has it's fair share of good songs, too (my favorite would be the closer, Brave Song). I look forward to an NA release. - 8/10

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