RustyShark.com is finally online!

Regular readers will know that I've been working on my new game and film review site for a good while now. I've been spending my spare time in the past few weeks editing the reviews I've written and gathered from friends, which has been a task in itself. Unfortunately, because the site is a bit of a movie and game database as well as a review site, it takes me a while to gather all of the information for each one, so I've not been able to launch with too many published! Suffice to say, I've got a lot more to get through, but when I've caught up I should be able to edit and publish reviews as they come in. All of the reviews I've received will be dealt with ASAP!

I've still got a long way to go until version 1 of the site is completely finished. I still have to write the news editing tools and there are lots of additional features I want to implement, like a Facebook login, more products from different sites and RSS feeds. Of course, I've still got quite a bit of layout tweaking to do, and quite a few additional niceties like a carousel and new panels.

For those interested, I've written the site in MVC3, using SQL Server 2008 and Entity Framework 4.3. I've written it from scratch, rather than use a CMS like Joomla or Umbraco, in order to thoroughly teach myself the MVC pattern and all of the tools Microsoft have added to the latest version. All sensitive information is encrypted with SHA256, and I've written a load of image manipulation classes and MVC helpers.

My JQuery isn't the best, so any front-end guys looking at the client-side code might have a chuckle or two. It's something I aim to improve in future years, as I quite enjoy it, but it's not something I've been involved with too heavily.

I've tested as much of the site as I can, with all of the major browsers. I haven't spent any time getting it working with older versions (especially not the dreaded IE6); it may be something I look in to in the future, but we'll see how it goes.

I still consider the site in "alpha", as I've not been able to really hammer the testing. If anyone sees any issues, or has any ideas about how to improve it, all feedback is appreciated!

www.rustyshark.com

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