A few weeks ago I decided to drop the multiplayer Ajax Rock, Scissor, Paper site I was working on.   My biggest problem was that when I work on these pet projects I don’t have hours to just sit and code.  By nature a site like Shoot4It.com it was impossible to just sit down and work on it for 20 minutes then walk away.  There was no real way to break it down into bite size chunks that I could whenever I had a few minutes.

So in the end I put that on hold and started on FantasyLifeGame.com.  I’ve owned the domain for over a year now and have been kicking around the idea long before that.  I’ve made two previous attempts to code the site, but scrapped them both times because I didn’t like the way they were playing out.

I can’t say enough good thinks about cakephp.  It’s made my coding life so much easier and enjoyable.  Now I dread even thinking about a site that isn’t using cake (of some other structered MVC framework).

It would probably be best to read the description of what FantasyLifeGame.com is before continuing reading this post.

I’ve been lax in writing about my adventures in creaking FantasyLife, athough I didn’t really do anything too revolutionary here.  I hit some of the usual Ajax snags.  I spent a solid day getting the inline editing to work only to realize I didn’t like the user experience.  In the end I went with a modified type of inline editing where I swapped out the entire div with a form.  A much more pleasant (and pretty sleek) experience.  I sprinkled Ajax in places I thought it would work best, but didn’t go overboard.

I finally got to use Lightbox in a project, which I was dying to do, since I think it’s the coolest thing ever.  Although I only allow 4 pictures per post.  I’m not trying to be the next Flickr here.

Anyway, 99% of the main functionality is done.  There are hundreds of smaller things I want to add and lots of tidying up to do, but the site is quite usable right now.

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