Hello,

It has been an interesting adventure putting this site together and I am excited to start sending out the first round of invites. Before getting things started with the public I thought I would share a bit about how this site came about.

First and foremost I started this project as a means to practice web development. The site is almost exclusively written in PHP and utilizes MySQL. I was also able to integrate DHTML principles when designing the game's board, which is displayed using CSS. I am not sure this was the best approach, but it works for now and is something I can probably improve as I learn new tricks. Additionally, the game concept provides some interesting content to get creative with when thinking about social networking and feeds, something I hope to explore sooner than later.

Although the game can currently be played from beginning to end, there are still a number of things that are not ideal. Nonetheless I have decided to start inviting the first potential members because but if I try to fix everything I may never finish, I hope people bear with me a bit.

In the interest of disclosure I want to list the current bugs that I am following most closely. I also hope that some knowledgeable hackers out there can give me some tips on how to resolve them.

• XMLHttp - The game's board uses an XMLHttpRequest to gather the necessary data to make the board interactive without re-loading the page. This works, but the board takes a few seconds to load even after the page is completed. From a user experience perspective this sorta sucks because often you click the board and it doesn't do anything. I am thinking that I can start loading the JSON data before the page is completely loaded so that is is ready before the user notices. ideas?
• The cards page layout is really bad. For now just live with it until I get around to making it look pretty.
• There is a large gap between the game controls (ie. attack, deploy etc..) and the top of the board. I am currently forcing the height on the DIV because previously the board was overlapping the bottom of the controls and I couldn't figure out why. Unfortunately not all of the stages in the game have the same controls, so sometimes the gap is excessive.

I will keep posting as things change and I hope to hear from anyone with questions, complaints or suggestions.