With the release of version 1.0 of the site, I thought it might be nice to let everyone know where we stand.

As most of you know, this website is Eric's and my senior project for our Computer Science degrees. We have spent most of the school year working on this. Our initial plan for the site started as a pretty simple idea...however, as we continued to discuss the project, we kept coming up with more and more features to add. We still really haven't even touched the tip of the iceberg as far as what we'd like to do with this.

Most of all, we want this to become a close-knit community of music lovers.

When we first started working with this, we both had some experience making websites using PHP, MySQL, CSS, XHTML and other common web languages. However, neither of us had ever created something this expansive from the ground-up. Because of this, our infrastructure that we are using isn't optimized to be handling as much traffic as we'd like, but hey, this was supposed to be a learning experience, right?

Well, with the school year coming to a close and the deadline for this project arriving next week, we won't be able to devote as much time to this project as we are currently. This will especially be the case when we have jobs (or should I say 'when I have a job'...stupid Eric already has one...). However, we both strongly desire to continue this site and make into something even bigger and better.

We've mentioned some of our plans before including 'gangs', 'showdowns', a custom-built forum, and more. However, we want to wait on these things. We have learned so much during the making of this website. We learned a new technology (AJAX) that allows for things to be done without reloading the page (the new rating bars, tag posting, the music searching/adding interface). Of course, if we had all of this new knowledge before starting, we could have made the site even better.

Our current plan is to continue to fix bugs and optimize things on the live site. After all, ensuring a fun viewing experience is our primary goal. Thankfully, with the onset of the mixtape creation system, we are hoping to have enough to entertain you all for quite awhile. In the meantime, we are going to take all of the knowledge we have learned and use it to rebuild the site from scratch to have it be efficient, more bandwidth-friendly, and more accessible. We feel that before we add new features, we need to get the backbone of the site stable and ready to handle hundreds, if not thousands of concurrent users.

Finally, we will both continue to be very active members of the site, but in order to finish our dream of establishing the Mixtape Collective community, we need your help. We need all of you to tell your friends and to try to recruit people to try out the site. After all, the experience and fun of the site will inceease astronomically with more people.

Thank you all for showing interest and helping us out. This project has turned out to be very rewarding because of all of your activity and positive feedback!