I haven't been writing much this month because most of my spare time has been dedicated to a significant overhaul on Offers.com. You can get the skinny on the Offers.com Upgrade on the Offers.com Blog.

Some things you may notice about search:

  • Increased speed
  • Faster updating
  • Smarter redirects to company pages, offer pages, category pages, and brand pages
A few observations about going through a major overhaul like this:
  • Move to Git first. Just do it. That day-long merge to stable you'd have to do with SVN just isn't a problem for Git. When under a tight deadline, it allows a high amount of massively parallel development.
  • A big overhaul is always a good time to do some spring cleaning on your code. Sort of an obvious one, but you should definitely consider taking advantage of this opportunity if you have a few spare minutes during the dev cycle.
  • Always use major changes to a site as an opportunity to converge towards simplicity, and not additional complexity. This includes things from information and site architecture to URL structure and display rules. It will mean less confusion for code maintenance in the long run.
I'm now off to a much-deserved 3-day weekend, followed by a much-anticipated vacation. After that, I may be too busy diligently studying for the Zend PHP 5 Certification Test I have scheduled for June 15th. But hey, I'll have to at least update this blog to announce the results of that (and add the other certification tag to it).