New Design Teaser

In the next week or two things will start back up again in a major way. In the mean time, have a look at a screen shot of the design that we’re working on implementing:

We’re pretty happy with it.

Still Cruising

Lots of work going on behind the scenes, but not much to speak of. The site design is coming together and we’re putting the finishing touches on the business plan. New features are still coming slowly, although we’re going to be pausing that soon when we start to deploy the sexy new design.

One thing worth mentioning, though, is that my problems with opera and Script.aculo.us/Prototype have been cleared up thanks to a commenter who suggested that I download the version of prototype that was being used on the Script.aculo.us site. That cleared the problems right up. Hopefully the forthcoming release of prototype doesn’t contain these same bugs.

Approaching Beta

After the public demo, which went smashingly well (big thanks to Orson from EDSBS for joining us), our plan was to move forward into something of a Beta phase. No major bugs were uncovered during the demo, so that plan will continue apace.

More specifically, development will continue with the actual event application, but there’s lots of administrative things that need to be developed now, too. The final design should be agreed upon this week, and then it needs to be implemented. There are a few more features we want to get worked in (including Pagination for those long events, and Remote Blog Integration, which I’ve talked about before) and we’ll also be putting together a short video showcasing the features.

From this point things could happen quickly, or they might take a few weeks. Time will tell.

LiveDemo Imminent

Not much else to say… we’ll be keepin’ it real over at PostFresh.com starting at 7:45pm eastern. Hope to see you all there!

Late Nights and Snags

Things are still on pace for tomorrow night’s LiveBlog, although last night was a late one. Every developer has come across a time when something stops working for what seems like no reason at all. Being mostly logical people, developers realize that it’s not possible for code to work and then stop working if nothing has changed… but finding what changed or, just as importantly, why that change matters, can be a stressful, frustrating experience.

Last night I was having a problem where a javascript function would not complete, but it would also not throw an error. It just seemed to die, leaving half of the function uncompleted. It ended up being a problem with a javascript for…in loop. The for…in loop iterates over every member of an object… every single one. This includes inherited members and (I think) methods. I’m not sure where, exactly, this caused the problem, but it looks like there are parts of the prototype/script.aculo.us library that, if they fail in a certain way, fail silently.

I also ended up having to re-tool one of the display algorithms because it choked when using the display effects on a large number of new items. Those things seem to be working now, and features are slowly being implemented in preparation for tomorrow’s demo.

Public Demo & Plans for Beta

Public Demo: Jan 7th
We’ve reached a point in the development that I think we’re ready to flip another switch. On the 7th we’re having a public demo of the capabilities in the form of a LiveBlog of the GMAC Bowl. Because I’m not very funny, we’ve rounded up a venerable (and funny) LiveBlogging expert from Every Day Should Be Saturday to take care of things for us. It should be a pretty good time and for those who care more about PostFresh and less about college football (in general) or that bowl game (in specific), it’ll be a good example of the features.

Plans for Beta
After the demo, if things go well, we’ll spend a few days squashing some bugs and fine-tuning before we start opening up for beta testing. Things are still subject to change, but we anticipate that the early stages of the beta will work like this:

If you have an event you want to liveblog, you’ll let us know in advance (there will be a form) and we’ll slowly open the nozzle number, frequency, and size of the blogs so that we can keep an eye on performance and bandwidth.

Once we’re satisfied that performance is where it should be and our host is satisfied that it won’t take down the whole noc, we’ll start into a period where beta testers will be able to start events at the drop of a hat, as they please, and we’ll increase the number of hosts until we’re happy with where the software is, at which point we’ll release it to the public. Beyond the very first stage of this, we have no solid time-line.

Lazy Registration

Today I finished up adding support for a kind of “Lazy Registration” by way of OpenID and TypeKey (as I mentioned before). Anonymous users aren’t going to be allowed to comment, but folks will be allowed to login with an OpenID or TypeKey and that will allow them to comment. At any point they’ll be able to convert those identities into full-fledged PostFresh accounts. Two things will be unavailale to the lazy users: ratings and “remember me” for logins. The former a precaution to avoid gaming and the latter a function of the way these authentication mechanisms work.

The only thing I’m having trouble with, at present, is getting things to work with LiveJournal. For starters, it seems that LiveJournal sees requests for ‘http://xxx.livejournal.com/’ and ‘http://xxx.livejournal.com’ as two different identities, and disallows the latter. The former returns an invalid authentication according to my library, but running the diagnostic at OpenIDEnabled doesn’t show any problems. Hopefully this doesn’t mean I’m going to need to switch to one of the more complex libraries.

Tomorrow I’ll have more information about the first public demo.