This will be my final Root Log as the nominal Lead Developer of Everything2. I've got a lot of stuff improved and put in place in this role, and I'm very proud of what the development team has achieved here in the last couple of years or so - besides what I have done myself, DonJaime, who overwhelmingly shares my vision for how the site ought to work, has achieved several major overhauls of things while making countless valuable interface tweaks; OldMiner has put in a huge amount of work to keep the site running at all, and to improve performance within the framework of systems which, to be frank, were not always up to the task at hand. Call's occasional work on things like the site's mobile version has also counted for a lot.
JayBonci has now taken over the reins of the site, and since he is a talented and dedicated programmer who probably has a bit more time to invest in the site than I have available myself, I am officially handing over the overall management of the code to him as well. I will continue to be a developer here when I can, but I have a lot of other things to sink my efforts into here - pulling together the E2 Podcast, general editing duties, and of course writing.
So, to the actual logging of my rooting - I have done a great deal of coding here since my last proper root log, which was way back in October 2010, so apologies for talking about some new features which are actually quite old by now.
- The Messages nodelet is a big one. The old Chatterbox handled private messages and public chat entirely in the same area, making it excessively easy to make private things public by mistake. The Messages nodelet tidies that up with a little reply box for any message when you hit the 'Reply' button, with options to delete or archive the message under 'Remove'. DonJaime was helpful with this, and it built on some of his earlier work to integrate jQuery better with the site.
- I re-did Guest Front Page in November last year, splitting it off decisively from the front page shown to logged in users. If I did my job, it is far less cluttered and more enticing than it used to be, but I would like to see this revisited again soon, along with the general styling of the site that guests see.
- Buffalo Generator is pure frippery. It generates random grammatically-correct strings of words which are both plural nouns and verbs.
- Buffalo Haiku Generator does the same thing in haiku form, naturally.
- Podcaster, the list of Everything2 Podcast episodes, is largely new.
- You can now see when a given e2node was made, by hovering your mouse over where it says 'Created by'.
For countless minor tweaks, see Patch Manager.