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AustinMania! genesis

I’ve decided the site needs to have more community involvement right off the bat, instead of waiting until I can add reader comments to this blog. Plus, reader comments are fine, but I think I need something more Austin-specific, an area of the site that is dedicated to Austinitis in all it’s glory. So, I’ve made an AustinMania! page, where people can share what they think is cool about Austin. At least, that is the initial functionality, I will probably add more later.

The next question revolved around how visitors would access the new page. I am very happy with how the Nav blobs look and work, so I didn’t want to add another one for this - it would throw off the whole symmetry! Since I had already decided there would be areas of the site not directly accessible from the Nav Blobs (such as the terms page, and the whole pixel purchasing process), this was ok, but the question remained: how and from where would I link to it?

In the end, I decided to hide the page and make a game of finding it, sort of like a puzzle, a bonus for those who chose to play. Yes, this is risky, but then again, this whole site is a grand experiment. The challenge then was to design a puzzle that was fairly easy, yet not obvious - plus of course, I still needed to devise and implement the solution.

Making this happen was fairly fun, but it ate up time, and the site didn’t launch this weekend.

Sentence deferred

I’ve won a reprieve - I’ve been spared! Well, for now at least. They are keeping me on at work for another month to wrap up a customer project. Well at least my resume is up to date now.

Ok, so it’s back to filling my off hours with AustinMash! code. Hopefully I can launch this weekend…

Deep into it

The integration with PayPal and the whole ad-buying process is taking longer to create than I anticipated. This is my first e-commerce site, and I keep thinking of new things I need to do, like the “success” page and receipt for after paying for the pixels. If I want to launch this any time soon, I am going to have to do so with limited functionality, and work on the rest after launch. I mean, the customer click report pages are not really needed until there are customers!

My current thinking is to finish the FAQ, do the PixelList page structure (again, don’t need the actual list until someone buys some pixels), and a basic Contact page, then move everything over to the web host and see if it works. Bugger! I still need to figure out how to use the MySQL dump commands to get the Skyline area map data uploaded. No rest for the weary!

Right after launch, the top priority will be modifying the ad-picking code to keep people from buying pixels that overlap existing ads. Then, I need to get the page and click counters running, then I can turn towards displaying the stats on the site. After that, the customer login, reporting, and account editing pages, I think, followed closely by the weekly report e-mail functionality. Man I hope that actually gets used (as in I hope there are customers to e-mail). Along the way, I will be improving the code compatibility with Opera and Firefox, since it’s taking long enough just to get it to work in IE. Interestingly, it seems Opera is closer to IE in how it handles Javascript than Firefox is. I suspect that is because Firefox follows the W3C specification more rigidly.

Later on, I’ll make this page into a proper blog instead of a static HTML page, with the ability for readers to leave comments. Then, after all that, then I get to start adding the fun stuff! Well, as the saying goes, anyplace on Earth is within walking distance, if you have the time…

And the verdict is…

It’s official - we’re being let go - our whole department, at the end of the month. At least management is “doing it right”, with proper notice and severance, which is a nice change of pace. I was at another startup a while back, I was there a whole three weeks before the VC’s decided it was all a big mistake, and please stop spending our money - I mean NOW!

So, the AustinMash! project has taken on a new urgency, but at the same time, I also now need to spend time on my resume and with the whole job search thing. Ugh.

… and getting better

I am making good progress. I have the Skyline area map fully working, and the ad-picking Javascript routines turned out pretty slick. They need some minor tweaking, but I’ll get to that later. I intend to make this site fully browser agnostic, so I’m having all sorts of fun dealing with the cross-browser issues. Mostly, I need to abandon my reliance on Microsoft DHTML extensions and IE programming shortcuts, which come in handy in enterprise settings, but not here! I am targeting IE 5.5+, Opera 8.x, and Firefox 1.x, but since I don’t own an Apple, I can’t test Safari.

Using PHP is turning out to be fairly smooth. I can use a lot of my ASP techniques, but with some added twists. For example, there is interesting built-in MySQL functionality, and a variety of ways to assemble text strings and write to the page. After seeing the kinds of traffic spikes experienced by the Million Dollar Home Page, I am mindful of writing efficient code, although that will probably evolve as I learn more about how this platform actually works. I wonder if there is any kind of execution tracing capability, like .Net has, to troubleshoot bottlenecks. Something to research later - I’ve got a site to launch!

My focus now is on getting the ad-buying process mapped out and working. I also need to start doing research on how to use PayPal.