Alta Web Works

Today is the last of the 30 days in the 30 day challenge, and I, like so many others, do NOT have a product ready to go. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy.

First, a project update: This project is not a huge one, but it’s not tiny, either. And it is complicated by the fact that there will be a desktop component, a server component and website components. Not tough stuff (it is designed by me, for me, which limits its complexity, I promise you!), but not a straight-forward coding job, either.

One of the toughest parts of the job has been knowing that I would need to learn some new stuff. Not impossible, not rocket science, but I’m not a PHP expert, and have never used javascript, either, so it was a bit scary. So, days were spent in research and study. A couple trips to the bookstore were in order, a fat new tech book was purchased, and time was spent on the web researching stuff. And life kept interfering…

Then I got lucky, and my husband decided he needed this new software too, and needed it now. That meant he had to write it. This was tremendously good news for me, as my husband is a much better, faster programmer than I am, and has more experience with the areas that would be new to me, and meant he’d do the work. How could that get better? So we sat down together more than once, went over my notes, talked the idea half to death, and got him up to speed on what needed to be done. Initially, we had both assumed that he knew as much about the design requirements as I did, because we had discussed it, as something I wanted to do and was working on. Once he dove into it, we realized that some clear spec sessions were in order, and so we spent the time with that. One entire morning last week we spent discussing the design and functionality, and why different pieces had to fit in certain ways — and also deciding on how some pieces would fit.

Then he got busy, and by the end of last week, the initial proof of concept was done. Truly exciting stuff. We were planning to take the weekend off, then he’d go forward full speed this week. At this point, we knew we weren’t going to be close to done for the 30-day challenge, but I thought I’d have more of interest to report at the end of this day. Then life threw us a curve ball.

We live in San Antonio, Texas, and are planning to move 2500 miles northwest, to Port Angeles, Washington (which is where I was born, and also has much cooler, more pleasant weather than South Texas). The hope is to go just as soon as we can get there. But first, we have to sell our house here. And before we list it for sale, we need to make sure it is in tip-top shape so that it will sell quickly. Fresh paint, some new hardware, new bathroom floors, baseboards around the entire first floor, new ceiling fans, wash all the windows and blinds and vents, clean out closets, the pantry, the garage, some fresh landscaping out front and just out the back door, pour water on the lawn to get it green… all that tedious work that takes time, and needs to be done for the house to show well.

We’ve been working on it, on and off, for awhile, and had recently decided that we’d spend every weekend devoted to it until it was done - the hope was to list the house for sale by the end of July. Then the curve ball. San Antonio is the corporate home of the corporate giant AT&T. They have thousands of employees here. Saturday morning, the headlines in our newspaper said AT&T is moving their corporate headquarters, and about 700 employees, to Dallas. Sometime between now and December.

My first thought was - that will be around 700 extra houses for sale, that wouldn’t be otherwise. Now, most of those homes will probably be the homes of executives, which will be in a different price range than our house… but some of them might be taking their secretaries (pardon me, “administrative assistants”) with them, and their homes might be in the same price range as ours. So… we need to list our house NOW.

My husband and I made the decision to take this week off of work, and get the house ready to sell. Then we’ll list it for sale next week - that should be well ahead of most of the AT&T employees who will be moving. That also means there will be no progress on our 30-plus day project until next week.

Like a few others, I’ll continue blogging about our progress on our 30-dayer project in the weeks to come. With any luck, we will be ready for beta by the end of July, and so it will have been a 60-day project. Not so bad, eh? We’ll see.

And now, the pantry clutter is calling. And the living room paint. See you later.

The last two days have been devoted to blog issues, research for my new app, and “personal productivity enhancement” (i.e. new hardware, lucky me!).

June 3: Blog issues. Since I’ve never had a blog, it was all new to me, which means I hit a few problems. With the advice of friends (which helped me overcome my apparent blindness), I found the feed URL. Then changed my name so it will hopefully show up in the feed as “Susan” instead of “admin”. Dinked around with something else, I forget what, and exchanged a few emails and newsgroup messages about this adventure. All somewhat necessary, but not necessarily productive. Not entirely happy with the day.

June 4: This day started with Mike’s excellent post about sploggers, something lil’ ol’ sheltered me had never heard of. Since I’m using WordPress as my blog, I downloaded the add-on he recommended to deal with it, Anti-Leech, and installed it with my husband hanging over my shoulder…

Once, when I was the Payroll programmer for the City of Reno, we had a big payroll problem. The clock was ticking because Payroll was a batch job that took hours to run — if the problems delayed the start time too much, they would call every payroll clerk in from every City department and start doing the Payroll by hand. With over 1000 employees to write checks for, and many of them cops and fire with weird pays, this was not something you wanted to do. So the director of the Finance Department (good ol’ Bruce) was hanging around the back of my cubicle, looking over my shoulder as I worked. My boss told him that I wasn’t going to find the problem any faster with him watching, and shooed him away. In fact, I didn’t care if an army watched me - as long as they stayed out of my line of sight, it didn’t affect my work.

I’m not so blase about my husband looking over my shoulder, but this time, it was good. I’m also not used to installation instructions being buried on product webpages, or in webpages of the app you’re installing into. He’s done this before and spotted what I didn’t, so in no time at all, I had AntiLeech installed and patrolling my blog. Yay. Darn splogger!

Then it was time to work on the app - or start the work for it, anyway. I’ve had this idea for quite awhile, well over a year, because it is something that I need myself. I even have a file for it, with 8 sheets of paper in it. 3 sheets of hand-written notes (not a lot of notes, plenty of white space, unfortunately), a couple of old newsgroup posts, and an article about this type of software that was written in 2004. OK, it’s not a new idea. And I don’t have a lot of data, but it’s a start.

The thing about this particular app is that there is a free alternative available, from a rather well-known company. The problem is that you have to give a boatload of proprietary information to the company in order to use their software. Which is why I’m writing my own. I’m kind of selfish about proprietary information, like how much money I make. Ain’t none of their business, IMO. Of course, that’s their price for using their software, and it is a price many people are happy to pay. I have no idea if I’ll have any customers because of that, but I need the software for my business, so maybe someone else will want it, too. If not, it will not be wasted effort, because I’ll be using it.

So I did some research on my competitor today, reading their website, looking at some of their information pages. My tool will not have the breadth of theirs, it can’t. We don’t have comparable resources, to put it most mildly. But I can still make mine worthwhile.

And then I dealt with a productivity issue. I sprained my ankle a couple of weeks ago, and it is being just plain slow to heal. Every time I think it’s better and push it, I pay the next day. So today, I decided to work on my laptop as much as possible, sitting up in bed. That keeps my ankle elevated nicely, and it doesn’t ache. But I’ve always found working on my laptop limiting, because of the stupid touch pad. It’s fine for basic things, but I do a lot of graphics, and it’s useless for that. A nice trackball mouse I could prop on my leg would be just the thing.

The last time I looked at trackballs, the decent ones ran over $50, and that’s more than I wanted to spend for a little convenience while my ankle heals. But today, in frustration, I checked a couple of websites… and found a decent trackball for $20! I was out of the house and on the way to Office Depot within minutes.

So now I’m working with my ankle up, my new trackball nice and handy, and feeling pretty good about the productivity of the situation. Too bad my 7-year-old is telling me it’s time to make her dinner. So much for productivity!

In May 2008, a challenge was issued in the “Joel on Software” Business forum: Join Patrick McKenzie in his adventure to design, code, release and begin marketing a new piece of software - all in 30 days (during June 2008). And blog about your adventures as you go, to share the joy and pain with your compadres on this 30 day road.

It just so happens I’ve been thinking about a new app for some time, and had hoped to get it done this summer. What a fun way to do it! So here I am.

The first step was to set up a blog, to join the group. But wait - I needed a domain on which to set up the blog. I could use my existing product domain, but I’d rather not. My new product is very different, so it wouldn’t fit. And there was no need, as I’d already registered a domain for the new product and paid for hosting, I just hadn’t done anything with it yet. So my first step was to make the new website live. That meant designing a new website.

I love website design, but haven’t done as much as I’d like. I did 4 new designs in the last month, though, which has been fun. I like working with the new “Web 2.0″ look (once I started getting it). So, on June 1, the first official day of the challenge, I was quietly working on some kind of preliminary design for my new product website. I came up with a header, footer and background images. Although the navigation isn’t in there yet, I can see it in my head, and I’ll add it when I need it. I’m not totally happy with the design, at this point, but done is better than perfect, so it is a start. You can see it at Alta Web Works.

Next, I needed to set up a blog. I’ve never done this before, but I figured, how hard can it be? All kinds of non-techie people have blogs, I ought to be able to handle it. (In theory, anyway.) My host for this website is GoDaddy*, and blog software is certainly one of their offerings. So yesterday, June 2, was finish-the-website and setup-blog-day.

GoDaddy is a bit byzantine, but not actually difficult to find your way around most things if you’re familiar with websites and computers. I’m not sure how non-techie people do it - maybe they actually read the instructions. GoDaddy offers a whole list of blog software, most of which I’d never heard of. I read the descriptions of each one, looked at the user feedback graphs, and read user comments. It quickly became apparent that the best choice was the only blog software I’d even heard of, WordPress. I’ve heard good things about WordPress in the past, so this was an easy choice.

I went through the hoops to install the blog software… and then it didn’t work. I got a server error. Bummer! One of the things I like about GoDaddy is that they have a customer service phone number, they make it obvious (it was in the email they sent telling me my blog was installed), and there are people at the other end of the phone. It’s like a miracle. The nice guy in tech support told me to uninstall and reinstall, that would take care of it. He said this problem pops up now and then, and uninstall-reinstall fixes it. I guess that’s the blog’s version of ctrl-alt-del.

It worked, and I was in business. I looked at the default header and design, and fought everything in my being to NOT immediately try and make the blog page mirror my website. It doesn’t need to be perfect, this is early days. The point is to get busy on the project. I do like making things look pretty, though, but I’m a big girl now, and am learning to walk away sometimes. I did compromise, and at least changed the colors in the header to kinda match the colors in my website design. That was easy, and makes me feel better.

I snooped around the settings and menu items in the blog management, and it looks pretty darn easy. I’m content with my choice for my blog software. I’d love to poke around in there for awhile and see what I could make my blog look like with widgets and such, but with a 30 day deadline for a new app, I don’t have the time right now. Especially since I need to do a new release of my current product within the same time frame, and my 7-year-old is out of school in 2 days and will be around the house, and we are committed to being gone for a long weekend for a family reunion. No time, no time! Discipline. (argh)

And here we are. My first blog entry is nearly done. Now I need to figure out how to join the feed, or make a feed, or whatever it is I need to do, so that my blog will join the other 30-dayers.

Enough for now. See you later, with the next steps in the journey.

* Why host at GoDaddy? Those of you who know me, may know that my husband and I have a dedicated server at Illumen. Well, I’m planning on writing some “how to” articles for newbies, so I wanted to go through the process of setting up a site and related items (like this blog) without having our wizard Benjamin Krajmalnik doing all the server setup work. Saying, “Call Benjamin and give him the new domain name” probably wouldn’t be a useful instruction for most people setting up their websites.