Welp dear surpassers, I am not lost in Everglades, and yes, I have been poked and prodded at by Kayla and by others here at Surpass to get it done; and yes, I know I am following a very "Microsoft"'ish approach to this, but let me explain what's going on, instead of giving silly excuses
See, when initial plans were made about getting the status page done, it was naturally assumed that our backend would be written in Perl, because well, I've been doing perl for about 7 years now, and know it pretty darn well. Then, something struck us, and we decided to move in a totally different direction and take a different approach.
The approach I am speaking of, is the "Apple" approach, rather then the "Microsoft" way. By this I mean, we wanted to come up with something really cool, with all the bells and whistles, and not just do the usual "get the job done" path. We wanted quality, instead of a quick hack n' slash job where it just works. We wanted to be on the forefront of everything that is cool, lovely and pretty. Perl unfortunately is none of these (with a slight exception of a couple of nifty things such as writing backend apps like daemons, and crazy parsers etc :-) ).
I've been lately getting very interested in Ruby and the lovely Rails framework. And this is where the point comes to the conclusion -- we decided that it'd be more "Surpass" and more cutting edge, and just plain cooler to do a status that would be completely RoR powered. Due to the fact that I'm still stumbling at some points with RoR, this has subsequently taking a bit longer, but no worries - the end result will be worth the wait.
Want some other delicious details? My favorite editor (textmate) has stayed open with the entire Status rails application for over two weeks straight on my macbook. Every day getting peeked at, and worked on bit by bit.
So in retrospect, I really hope all of you can forgive me for making you guys wait more and more, but I promise, the end result will be awesome. Flowers will bloom, birds will sing, and the new Rails powered app is simply going to rock :-D
Love,
-Dan