I hired a designer to make some rockin' icons (thanks, Jenna!) for the forthcoming POP Forums v8. It's kind of weird how taking a break from the hardcore coding to make things pretty is a very motivating force. It's like the entire thing becomes more real at that point.
I finally did something a little AJAX-ish with it too. I say "-ish" because I didn't wire in the asynchronous-ness to it just yet. (Making up words is fun!) One of my pet peeves for online forums is all the useless crap that gets mixed in with the actual discussion. Seriously, I don't care what your avatar looks like or when you joined. So in this version, I'm hiding it. Click a name on this page, for example. It's really the only significant UI design decision I've made so far, but you can bet I'm going to refine the crap out of it until it's mostly good. Less is more.
I've also decided to make another performance tweak, and increase/decrease various counts instead of counting rows all of the time. Yeah, I probably should have been doing that six or seven years ago when I first started this forum nonsense. I'll probably go with the good old "freshness date" approach to make sure it hasn't somehow fallen out of sync now and then.
I don't think I'm going to hit the milestone I was hoping to hit by the end of the month. While that does bother me to some degree, I'm not going to let it depress me either.