Avalantern.com: Social Networking

I wrote this site over the course of too many years, as a full time job, lots of travel, and other projects made it rather difficult to finish sooner.

Its working title was "Peterdot 2.0", because it was really an extension of my experimental social networking site, Peterdot. It was a chance for me to practice taking any user input and making the site bullet proof, as it was no longer only me who was able to post anything. It is still a work in progress, though since the key elements are in place, it's not a high priority. I hope to add a photo based module, where users can post and store photos, comment on them, etc. Since most of the users currently have other sites to do that, however, it's not high on my list.

Some of the bigger challenges of building this site were creating a useful search engine, a CSS style that would easily allow for multiple layouts, as well as a layout/design I was personally satisfied with, and constantly balancing simplicity vs functions. I think I succeeded in most areas, though there's still quite a bit I'm not satisfied with, and am constantly tweaking.

The site is written in PHP, MySQL, and flavors of Javascript. It's hosted by Dreamhost in California.