Discussion forum

Blowing the cobwebs off the old blog here a bit .. excuse the tardiness! Focus has been elsewhere a bit (ok, a lot!) but things are still happening with TC development.

We’ve just launched stage 1 of a new discussion forum system. The very old version of the site had one, but it was pretty much a stand-alone thing which meant it took a lot of focus away from the site itself.

This time around, the discussions are embedded with the site itself. For phase 1 these are in each of the city homepages (e.g www.thursdayclub.com/london) under the ‘discussion’ tab.

All pretty simple stuff at the moment, but it’s nice and Ajaxy so doesn’t require page refreshes which will please the geeks amongst you

New topics and replies drive member update notifications for your status history too.

Future stuff will include re-editing and deleting posts, emoticons (maybe..) and a discussion homepage. Possibly embedding into other parts of the site too as it’s been written to be a fairly generic framework.

Now get posting

Paul..

One final push ..

One big final thing to upgrade - the members section .. yikes.

Anyway, we’re going to go live with a limited Beta (v3.0 of the site) which will probably have read-only membership functions using the old
members data for now. Likely with a limited registration process for new members for a short period until we’re post-Beta.

Most of the other areas for this first phase are now done. Just some major testing and performance tuning.

Realistic estimate .. out in around 7 days from now (man, I’m going to regret saying that!!!). This side of Xmas. Does that sound better? It does to me!

P..

Photographic

So .. I heard an urban rumour that while I’m sweating away at the keyboard here trying to get the site to render the same in IE and Firefox (gah!) the boys had set themselves a bit of a mission. Apparently Craig has a list of 80 venues they need to take photos of (whilst presumably sampling what’s on offer inside!). Sounds like a good job to me!

P..

Sugar Room

[update] Now that the site is well and truly alive again, Sugaroom has been updated on there (see it here). I always thought it was ‘Sugar Room’. Turns out it’s actually Sugaroom. Oops

Went to a nice restaurant the other night called The Sugar Room, which is in Pyrmont in Sydney (Australia!). Right down on the water at the end of Harris Street. It’s all become very fancy pants down that way now, quite Canary Wharfesque, minus the hoodies

Anyway, I had the barramundi, which was jolly good. Friendly service, although they stuffed up my dessert a bit, but I think that’s because it all got a bit panicky due to transport issues etc (long story). You can also just sit outside with a drink and look over the water to Balmain, which would make a pleasant afternoon start to a session IMHO.

The address is:

Sugar Room, Shop 2, 1 Harris Street, Pyrmont.
www.sugaroom.com.au

I’ll stick something on the main site (once I mend it!).

P..

Site update

At the risk of this starting to sound like a geek blog, I thought I’d post an update on site progress.

Last night I re-created the TC database on our new server, and uploaded all the data from the previous site (reviews, venues, members etc). Seemed to go ok, although I think there’s some wacky data that needs cleaning up.

Loaded up all the site files to the web server, but by then it was getting v.late and I ran into some issues (related to the data quality I think) that i was too tired to look at Will check that out later.

Given the old site was as good as dead anyway, I’ve just updated the DNS records to point to the new server, which means you should just get a holding page with a link to this blog from http://www.thursdayclub.com.

That’s it for now. I can’t tell yet how quick the site will be once it’s up as I think I also need to change a fair bit of the crappy code on there and re-index the data. Joy!

P..

Who says it’s all pipe and slippers?

Karim sent me an email recently. He’s working in Hong Kong at the mo (I’m sure he doesn’t mind me telling you), and it sounds ‘terrible’ … looks like a few new places to add to the site once it’s alive again!

P..

This is what he said:

“
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha bonk!

Ok well this trip I’ve been to:
Red Bar (Four Seasons), Petra she was nice….
MO Bar (Mandarin Oriental)
Chater Lounge (Ritz), Glenda, she’s cute
Champagne Bar, Grand Hyatt
Stormies in Lan Kwai Fong, met Jimmy here, good view of the Fong
Armani Cafe, Bar and Night Club, nice ladies
Mes Amis, Wanchai
Dusk Til Dawn, Wanchai
Insomnia,LKF
Annex, LKF
Kee Club, LKF
FCC
Post 97 (and next door)
Dragon-I
Drop, (Katherine was very friendly)
Wooloomooloo (Good restaurant and bar)
Boco (in Soho)
Tapas (in Soho)
Balaleika (vodka bar with walk in “fridge” type ice bar)
FINDS
Agave
Peak Cafe (soho)
Staunton’s
Feather Boa”

Why is the site dead/so horribly slow?

As mentioned previously we’d kind of left the site to rot, and with that meant that we, err, didn’t pay our hosting fees either (not wanting to name any names .. *CoughCraigCough*). Anyway, not unsurprisingly the hosting company didn’t feel like keeping the site up for free, and so they turned it off.

However .. the database is bizarrely still alive. So, in a moment of madness (or compassion, not sure which), I dropped the site onto a new ISP, based in Australia (where I am now) but connecting to the old database, which is somewhere in the UK. Long and short of which means … it’s alive, but runs slower than my grandfather.

Current reconstructive surgery will see everything back in a common hosting centre (in Texas this time .. my aren’t we cosmopolitan!), which should mean speed goes back to normal. At this stage phase 1 (back alive) should be this week all being well. Then follows a bunch of UI and feature updates, but they’ll probably be phased rather than a big bang relaunch (hey, those were so year 2000!).

All very exciting.

P..

[edit: just realised that if you've find this via The Google or similar you might have no idea what site I'm talking about: www.thursdayclub.com]

Take a journey back in time

.. in the words of a Level 42 song (remember them?).

Thanks to the wonders of the ‘Wayback Machine’ you can see how we looked back in 2001 when we first launched the Thursday Club website. We’d actually been running things since 1999, but this is the first instance that shows up on the radar of the Internets.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010801172419/http://www.thursdayclub.com/

Pretty nasty design wasn’t it?

Back in the days when all the content was hand-coded, which was fairly painful (and explained why it took so long to get new stuff up!).

Of course, we all still look exactly like our photos .. *ahem*.

This is a little snippet from the original ‘about us’ page. I might borrow that and use it again

” So what exactly is the Thursday Club all about then?

One Thursday in late 1999, five friends had a night out in London. Nothing unusual about that, and even though we visited a few places in the one night, it was still a fairly normal night out.

Over the next few weeks we started to go out every Thursday, and seemed to fall in to the pattern of always trying to get into somewhere new. To try and see the places we’d all heard about, but thought were too ‘cool’, or too exclusive for us to get into. Hence, the Thursday Club was born!”

P..

We’re back!

Hello friends!

It’s been a long time since we did anything with the Thursday Club site, and like some rusty old barge it was left rotting in the corner of the web while we carried on with our ‘normal’ lives.

Marriages, divorces, lost loved ones and overseas adventures had meant we sort of ‘moved on’ from the glory days of the Thursday Club. Aside from the fact that we weren’t living the lifestyle we once had, or were as close to each other as we had once been, the Web itself passed from vainglorious ‘it’s all about me’ content to ‘web 2.0′ style collaboration: networking, user-driven content, Ajax, mash-ups, RSS, everything always in Beta, digg me up and put my life on Flickr and YouTube for everyone to see. We were off doing our own thing, running other businesses and following other opportunities.

And yet .. always there in the background, like some omnipresent shadow was this .. thing .. this monster we’d created that didn’t want to go away. It came out at parties, or after a few drinks. The Thursday Club cards were still being played, and in our minds, no matter where we went, or who with, we were always scoring the venue, always keeping a secret little list of places on post-it notes and airline stationery. Just in case ….

As the World turns, so it seems we have come full circle. Older, maybe wiser, fatter (ok, I am) but bizarrely back in the game. Sure, our priorities are different now, but for whatever reason (pre mid-life crisis perhaps?) the hunger has returned. And with that, we’ve decided to spruce the old girl up and get things back on track again.

So, we’re going to repaint, refresh, update and enhance the site. We’ve got a long list of places to add to it, and we’re going to make it all much more collaborative. More in future blogs about the exact plans, but needless to say we’re excited to be back on it again, and hope we can count on as much support and help as we received first-time around. This time we’re all in it together

P..