Clarifying the Galleon Forums Project

In case you haven't seen it yet, the most popular entry on my blog to date is this entry about how I spent a couple weeks porting Ray Camden's Galleon Forums to several frameworks to show side-by-side comparisons.

This was a fun an interesting project to work on, although it seems like I made a lot of (common?) "usability" mistakes when I published the report. Admittedly, I spent a lot less time on laying out that report than I have previously on software interfaces. So as frustrating as it is, I'm not exactly shocked that several people have commented about confusion when reading it.

When I first published the finished report I had merely uploaded it as an enclosure in one of these blog entries and Sean Corfield had commented that he had difficulty finding the download link. (Which technically is an issue with BlogCFC.) And then after I put it up on a public server he was stymied by the navigation on the index page. :P

Anyway, yesterday Adam Tuttle sent me an email in which he expressed some confusion about the reason why I wrote the report in the first place. Which confused me at first. :P And then I went back and looked at the overview and intro sections he'd mentioned and I realized that I had actually NOT explained why it is that I went to the trouble of doing all that work. :P I hadn't given the history or "back story" behind the project.

So long story short (I know, too late), I've added a paragraph to the introduction and links back to the blog here to help keep folks from getting lost in my report and to better explain the purpose behind it. :)