These changes are both exciting and bittersweet. I’m psyched about GitHub (peering at other people’s code in such a sexy interface is exciting! really!). I’m a little sad, as well. Putting the scripts on GPL for me symbolized a kind of letting go. It’s not throwing in the towel and giving up on these scripts of mine–I still want to work on them–but I feel that this should have been done a long time ago, if I only knew how loooong it would take me to get updates and new features out. By now, Enth codebase (or any of my other scripts’ codebase) is probably close to monolithic. It certainly looks quite dated! But putting it on GitHub means it’s easier to get changes out, faster, and less of an “event” as it is when I was hosting it.

What does this mean, though? It means if you have a hacked version of Enthusiast (for example) you’ve been wanting to release but couldn’t, you’re free to now, however and wherever you like, as long as I’m credited and it’s released under the same license. You’re now free to offer services to install and configure Enthusiast, as I’ve heard a couple of people doing. You don’t need to ask my permission to do either of the above.

It also means I’m free-er to iterate on my work without needing to bundle them into nice and shiny organized releases. It means that if there are updates, they get out there faster (hopefully!). It means less management on my part, and more coding.

Here’s to more git repos in the future! (Again, if you want to get to the scripts, they will be at github.com/angelasabas.)

I enjoy coding. I enjoyed it many years ago when I made my first website from scratch, and I continue to enjoy it today. I especially enjoy making things that I can use but make it so that other people can use it, too. I like finding out that something I made is useful for others. That’s the whole reasoning behind all of the linkware scripts that I have done.

And then, Enthusiast happened. For whoever of you who have no interest in the fanlisting online community, you probably have no idea what it is. Enthusiast is a fanlistings and fanlistings collective management script, and a pretty damn good one (at the very least, back when I was active in the community). I have no idea where fanlisting scripts stand nowadays, but I’d like to think Enth is holding its own even if it’s old and “clunky”. I started writing the earliest versions for myself, prettied it enough to make it downloadable, and in no time at all it was huge (figuratively and literally).

It’s still my baby. I loff it the same way I loffed it before. But after months (a year? more?) of hemming and hawing, I’ve decided that I needed to step back from it, maybe temporarily, maybe permanently. Enth has affected my life a huge deal, in many different ways.

The good things:

1. The no-brainer: easier fanlistings management! I love fanlistings, they’re cozy and cuddly. But they can be crazy in droves! But Enth has really pulled through for me on this.
2. I learned a lot about PHP coding from making Enthusiast. A lot, from things I researched myself, and things people taught and showed me.
3. I’ve met a lot of people via Enth; from users to fellow coders. A number of them I’ve grown quite close to, even if we’ve all slowly moved away from fanlistings.
4. I can’t begin to imagine how much time I’ve spent on Enthusiast, but the time spent with it has been, on the whole, very enjoyable.

Enth’s popularity does have its downsides, such as:

1. Enth’s slowly morphed into something almost unmanageable. I’ve felt a bit of pressure with doing this and doing that simply because, well, it’s what users want. While generally these are things that I do want somewhere down the line, it’s just slowly gotten to the point when my hobby project has become a bit of a burden and yet there’s this pressure to work on this, to fix this, to add this feature.
2. The pressure related to this has affected my participation in the fanlistings community. I’ve felt guilty working on my fanlistings when Enth (Enth4 specifically) is still not done. I haven’t applied for any fanlisting in ages because of the same.
3. People’s expectations seem to keep rising and rising. I have no idea what people expect now, but that’s because I’ve purposely avoided knowing what they are, now. I want to make Enth better so much, and I have a lot of ideas on how to do that; but can you imagine how many will complain about what happened to this feature, or why is this doing this now, or I’m not moving because it’s a pain to upgrade. These are certainly all part and parcel of getting a script up for others to download, but little ol’ me feels overwhelmed.

I feel it’s sad that the reason why I worked on Enthusiast (that is, fanlisting) became something I avoided or felt guilty about doing because of Enthusiast.

I’ve gone through months and months of agonizing about this. The fact that I do have other things on my plate doesn’t help with the indecision and the pressure that I was getting, too. When I finally made the decision to put Enth on hold, I finally felt that I could breathe easier.

And thus, there you have it. Enthusiast is officially on hold. All development is stalled, I haven’t looked at any Enth code in months. It doesn’t mean to say I will never go back to it, but it won’t be for a good while. :) Maybe when I can get back into the fanlistings world, eh?

If you have any questions, concerns, or any general comments about Enth (or anything else dev-related I have done), please feel free to comment and ask. (Don’t ask me for troubleshooting support though ;) that doesn’t change, haha!)

On the subject of Enthusiast, I would like to assure everybody that I have not “abandoned ship”. Believe you me, I’ve been through a lot because of Enthusiast, from disgruntled users who swear at me or my script, to people who have ripped my script and claimed it as their own. Yes, I have thought of “abandoning ship” plenty of times, and I suppose this might keep happening far into the future.

But I haven’t thrown in the towel just yet.

That doesn’t mean, however, that everything will be oh-so-fine and dandy and scripts will get chugged out of this scripts archive/tech blog at a steady pace. I wish I could, but there are only 24 hours a day, and seven days a week. I am no longer a college student, as the case was when I started Enthusiast all those years ago and virtually no one knew about it.

(I started to break down my time in an attempt to show just how scrapped for time I am, but I decided not to let it go that far.)

Enthusiast is not the only thing I have to put my time on. I have three blogs, and none of them even get updated as regularly as I like. My first love is creative writing, but I can’t even allot proper time for that. If you look at my fanlistings, a whole chunk of them haven’t even had new layouts in a year, some of them over two! I’ve even relegated to using layouts made by others in my journal (and maybe others) in an attempt to cut down on whatever coding I need to do. I’m a developer/designer, coding is what I do, but I can’t have time to whip up a quick CSS file to customize my own things. How sad is that?

Enthusiast is not the only thing I want to do. I have three scripts I want to create, one script that desperately needs a revamp (and I mean really desperately, but guess what? Enth development is still ranked higher), and I have a couple of others (featured here) that needs an update sometime soon. They’re all competing for attention, and I’m trying to manage it all, along with my work as a Yahoo, the little things we need to do daily so that we continue living, take care of my health, interact with the people around me.

That said, Enthusiast is important to me. I don’t think any one of you who are using it can claim that Enthusiast is more important to them than it is to me. It is important to you only so far as it helps you maintain your fanlistings, but Enth as an entity by itself is useless to you. You’re free to move to other scripts if you find Enthusiast lacking, I’m not stopping you.

To those of you who have shown me support, who help others with their Enthusiast installations, who have donated a little bit to my tip jar for my efforts…I thank you, from the bottom of my heart. Your show of support does not go unnoticed, and they continue to fuel the work here when times are tough. <3

(For those of you interested in it, it will probably be slow going, as whatever free time I have needs to be spent juggling between rest/recreation/social/family/other hobbies… and because I’m putting in a lot more effort in the backbone, and in usability.)

One thing I’ve always believed in is that you only get as good as what you actually do. That one might read a lot of tech blogs, a lot of white papers, a lot of those hifalutin framework blueprints… but if you don’t get down and dirty with code, you can’t expect to get better. It’s a given that the first few codes you churn out will be riddled with flaws. That’s normal, but that’s better than never getting over that simply because “I can’t fully understand OOP yet, I need to read more about it”. Ugh, get a grip, and get on with playing with code.

My first PHP project, way back when I was doing self-studying, was actually the precursor to Enthusiast. It was the script that handled my then-fanlisting, Bubblegum Crisis. After it was working, I moved on to the first “system” — an admin tool for handling my directory for NeoPets galleries. I actually put up that site, got a pretty nice following for it, and then when I weaned off NeoPets, I shut it down.

And then I started working on Enthusiast (the single-fanlisting version).

Without these first projects, I’d never have learned PHP. And this time, with PHP4′s End of Life looming in the distance, Enthusiast will be bringing me forward to PHP5. OOP, Exceptions, and many newfangled stuff in PHP isn’t new to me, but it’s been a while since I’ve actually handled PHP code continuously (almost eight months–the same time I’ve been with Yahoo! as a frontend engineer). I will be getting personal with a lot of these new things, in order to do what I need for it to do. And that’s quite exciting.

For anyone who’s thinking of learning PHP, the best way to learn really is by doing something you’re passionate about using PHP. I was passionate about NeoPets galleries; I was passionate about fanlistings. The passion drives you forward, and that’s a great thing to have.

I will probably be blogging here occasionally about new things I find out while working with PHP, or thoughts on development in general — what would you like to hear about?

Life is just barely settling down after the holidays, and I’ve been meaning to work on Enthusiast for a while now, but kind of endlessly putting it off. I want that to change, but to change that, I’ll have to do a bit of reassessment, and to pinpoint why I have lost the thrill and joy of working on Enthusiast.

It won’t mean it will be gone, as even if I feel rather unmotivated to work on Enth, I still love it and want to bring it to the next level. I’ll just have to figure out what the next level is.

Just in case it helps others out there, here’s something I’ve started reading that I feel is helping me a lot: Getting Real. A lot of things won’t be applicable to Enth (I don’t think suddenly scaling down features is an option) but I’m trying to figure out what to do with the stuff I’m reading and taking in.