Entrecard..nerves!
Well, after 3 weeks of crazy work, Entrecard is going live at 7am. Well, technically we're already live but I'm still fiddling around a bit.
Bit nervous, not really worried about the systems etc, but the whole system is so very different from a regular web application that it's hard to tell where things will end up.
There were a number of fascinating things about this project. For a start, we had these chunky 125x125 things flying around everywhere, and we needed a good way to be able to work with them from the dashboard. The dashboard concept of 4 vertical columns was my solution to this, since the chunks were time-related - less interesting stuff goes *down* and eventually falls off the end of the page, so you only really end up scrolling if you're bored.
Other areas included about 3 attempts at determining how the advertising system worked. Previous to the queue system we've got now we had a day-by-day concept which eventually suffered ideological collapse under the weight of timezones and the interfaces necessary to permit day selection etc.
And, of course, there's Amazon S3. While most of dev we were using a local version of the card management, it was clear that the last thing we wanted to do was screw with our customers' blogs. It was utterly vital that the widgets appearing on the blogs were always available, and plenty fast regardless of load - so, S3.
Pulling this off, given the widget is dynamic, not static, took a fair bit of doing. I'm pretty proud of the results however - clever javascript FTW.
Mostly, the crazy thing was that for much of the project we were just making it up. Graham had this idea, but in its original form it was just this concept..we had no pre-conceptions, we weren't copying anyone else, we basically had to try and discard idea after idea - sometimes as late as an hour or two ago when I redid the front page entirely - in an attempt to find methods that worked well.
On top of that part of the work of course, there were deadlines (blogger conference in a few hours), video people needed source material (feel free to play Spot the Error in the video), we had to build the hosting system as well from the ground up (right up to deciding where to host), I believe we had people working on this thing around the globe, from Serbia to New Zealand, with no contact except the internet. It was great fun, really challenging and..now..nerves-inducing.
So, err, go sign up and get a card eh? admire my vertical inbox. Oh, and the charts, click on "Statistics", pretty charts. Lemme know if you have any ideas, or just dump 'em in the feedback box on the dashboard.
Oh, one last thing, we have discovered the truly spookiest firefox rendering bug you have ever seen. I have to go try and make that go away now, when I can only make it happen one in every 10 or so page loads.
Bit nervous, not really worried about the systems etc, but the whole system is so very different from a regular web application that it's hard to tell where things will end up.
There were a number of fascinating things about this project. For a start, we had these chunky 125x125 things flying around everywhere, and we needed a good way to be able to work with them from the dashboard. The dashboard concept of 4 vertical columns was my solution to this, since the chunks were time-related - less interesting stuff goes *down* and eventually falls off the end of the page, so you only really end up scrolling if you're bored.
Other areas included about 3 attempts at determining how the advertising system worked. Previous to the queue system we've got now we had a day-by-day concept which eventually suffered ideological collapse under the weight of timezones and the interfaces necessary to permit day selection etc.
And, of course, there's Amazon S3. While most of dev we were using a local version of the card management, it was clear that the last thing we wanted to do was screw with our customers' blogs. It was utterly vital that the widgets appearing on the blogs were always available, and plenty fast regardless of load - so, S3.
Pulling this off, given the widget is dynamic, not static, took a fair bit of doing. I'm pretty proud of the results however - clever javascript FTW.
Mostly, the crazy thing was that for much of the project we were just making it up. Graham had this idea, but in its original form it was just this concept..we had no pre-conceptions, we weren't copying anyone else, we basically had to try and discard idea after idea - sometimes as late as an hour or two ago when I redid the front page entirely - in an attempt to find methods that worked well.
On top of that part of the work of course, there were deadlines (blogger conference in a few hours), video people needed source material (feel free to play Spot the Error in the video), we had to build the hosting system as well from the ground up (right up to deciding where to host), I believe we had people working on this thing around the globe, from Serbia to New Zealand, with no contact except the internet. It was great fun, really challenging and..now..nerves-inducing.
So, err, go sign up and get a card eh? admire my vertical inbox. Oh, and the charts, click on "Statistics", pretty charts. Lemme know if you have any ideas, or just dump 'em in the feedback box on the dashboard.
Oh, one last thing, we have discovered the truly spookiest firefox rendering bug you have ever seen. I have to go try and make that go away now, when I can only make it happen one in every 10 or so page loads.
posted by PhiRatE at
11:29 PM
