David Dyess .com

Crappy Service! Ok, no littering, but it hasn’t only been a lack of time that has kept me from blogging the last couple of months.

I have cable Internet through MidContinent, a “communications” company, based out of Souix Falls, SD. They have awesome bandwidth – 15mb/s download and 1mb/s upload [and that isn't the top tier package]! Unfortunately, I live on an Air Force base, where there is always construction or something going on and it appears to be interfering with my service somehow. I Googled the password to my cable modem and watched the signal rates and logs for several weeks and it seemed to be doing 1 of 2 things – the signal would either get way too low or jump up out of range and be too high. I would only have a connection for an hour at most and it would drop, sometimes for hours without reconnecting.

They have sent 4 technicians out to my house to “fix” it. Of course when they showed up it would happen to be in one of the hours it would work, then it would die after they left. I finally gave up and scheduled DSL to be hooked up, which happens Friday. Since then, though, the cable has mostly worked. It seems to get a little better each day, which is what it did last month before slumping to the low point this time.

I really like MidCo’s Internet, when it’s working. I just can’t believe they wouldn’t do more to figure out the problem than sending someone out to my house 4 times and not fixing anything. So far the only thing I’ve seen out of one of their visits is the loss of my $120 cable modem, which they “traded” for $35 and this cheap one I’ve had since before this month’s worst service. Hopefully SRT’s DSL service (my only other option for Internet service here) is better. I may lose my mind if I have to spend a Winter here without Internet.

Around the middle of August marked 1 year since I began working on the Clay Framework. It’s been a short year… I never would have believed I’d work on it this long without a Beta release. I’ve often wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have started out with a more open source approach, but I think the things I’ve learned over the last year are worth the path I’ve taken. I’ve rewritten much of it a few times and working those changes into release cycles would have prolonged development even further, I think.

I will be pushing a majority of the Clay code base to an SVN repository soon (a long with a public release), I just haven’t decided what version number tag I want it to have. It will either be called 0.4.x Beta or 0.9 Beta. There is kind of a good reason for the split decision: I consider the framework to be the back end functionality, not the extra bells and whistles using the functionality. I don’t want a heavy framework, that was the sole purpose of writing Clay in the first place. The framework, IMHO, is the main class [the API loader and bootstrap], the application layer [responsible for building the output data], and the template layer [responsible for deciding how and where to display the output data] – all of those I consider to be at least deserving of a 0.9 version number. There are “features” missing, compared to the heavier frameworks, but those are more of the content genre, not the back end. I am leaning toward releasing Clay Framework as 0.9 and having a separate package that I release as a Content Management System. That will allow me to keep the framework light and independent from the features I don’t consider as back end [in essence "bloat"-proofing the framework].

Summary: Clay is mostly where I want it to be as a framework, but adding too much more to it will make it a content management system. After a year of development, Clay [Framework] is maturing toward 1.0 status, while a Clay CMS hasn’t arrived yet. I look forward to the day [soon] when Clay is in the wild and, hopefully, some others can help me build it toward 2.0.