Project Future
Project Future is a feature of postctydepression.com that allows CTYers to see where other CTYers will be going in 2008, which session they'll be going to, and what class they'll be taking. It hopes to replace, or at least organize, the thousands of email/forum/Facebook posts about where everybody's going.
Contents
History
2005
Project Future started out as a website called "CTY Members", which was Tripod-hosted and manually updated by its admin, then-squirrel Charlie McGeorge.
2006-2007
After postctydepression.com was founded in 2006, CTY Members was completely reworked. Now with a buggy-but-usable PHP form handler, it was renamed Project Future and made a feature of Post-CTY Depression. The entire thing was lost in the PCTYD crash of (2006? 2007?).
2008
It returned again in early 2008, rewritten to support new features like integration with the Post-CTY Depression forum, double-session support and more intuitive browsing.
Features
Basic
The most basic features of Project Future have been around since 2005: that is, the ability to upload one's name, email address, AIM screen name, and course information (site, session, and class title) for a single CTY session. CTY Members also had a webpage for every class, to which you could navigate and see that class's members; hence the title. As far as Charlie remembers, registration was handled by email, or maybe a form that got sent to an email account.
New in 2006
In 2006, a new interface was designed to make browsing easier. This interface, which is still used today with minor changes, saw a three-column page design, with the center column being the widest. The leftmost column had lists of users and of classes; any user or class could be clicked upon, and its details would appear in the center column. One could click around to one's heart's desire and find one's future classmates, or just stalk people.
New in 2008
After the PCTYD crash of (2006? 2007?), Project Future had to be written again from scratch. It was, and it came back with a wonderful plethora of new features. Double-sessioners can now submit both sessions, not just one; the Project is now hopelessly integrated with PCTYD itself (it adds PCTYD private messaging to the options for contacting members, and users' PF information shows up in their signatures on PCTYD); PCTYDers can actually edit their information; the class list is organized by site; you can now view all users, or all the people going to a particular site, or all the classes on the entire Project.
Current status
Project Future is currently working, along with the rest of PCTYD. It had about 120 members last time this was updated. Out of all 222 classes CTY is offering in 2008, more than 1/3 of them have been submitted to Project Future. Like most websites, it plans to take over the world, and it's getting there.
