With the report on the January Five just out the door, it feels a little odd to be writing the February Five. But such is life.

Before I get to this month’s list, let me say that I don’t like giving myself a C+ for last month. It hurt, which is perhaps a good indication of my level of pride that I have invested in this endeavor. It would have been easy for me to exaggerate how “done” some of those items were, but the entire point of this exercise is to create metrics by which we can evaluate the progress of our software. Any attempt to shade reality completely defeats that purpose.

Here are the February Five.

1. Updates to applications. This is a carry over from the January Five. The goal for February is to remove the YUI completely from the application and replace it with the relevant portions of jQuery UI. Not only will this enable us get away from the older version of YUI that we were using, it will allow us to make use of the great work that the jQuery developers have put into their library.
2. Enhancements to management software. This is a carry over from the January Five. I believe the core of the this work is done, and it should be another 40-60 hours worth of work to get that wrapped up.
3. Launch of public website. This is a carry over from the January Five, and is pretty self explanatory. We need to get the new site up. Period.
4. Code centralization. This is a new item for February, and although it is already completed I feel that it constituted such an important benchmark for our software that it needed to be called out anyway. There are two elements to this item. The first element is to move the common script files, style sheets, and images off to a content delivery network for faster delivery to the client browsers. The second element is to develop and deploy a way for true centralization for reseller sites. Expect a blog post towards the end of the month with further details of this item, as we are very proud of it.
5. Website upgrades. There are three sites that are still using older versions of our software. In fact, one of those client sites still exists on a server whose sole purpose is to host that site. By upgrading and migrating that site to the new software and environment, we will be able to retire that environment and provide the client with the great enhancements we have been developing over the last few months.

Well, there you have them. I am confident that we will score above a C+ this month, but you will have to check back in a few weeks to see.