Alternative Nation - AltNation - A Developers Commentary

Behind the scenes glimpses in the day to day life of trying to break altnation.com

Electric Company & Water Works

Posted 8th January 2008 at 10:57pm by phlogiston

Today has been a utilitarian day. A sense of nothing actually achieved, no new challenges met, no new mountains climbed. (Clumb...?!)

Lots of research into affiliate schemes and generating deep links for bands and music albums with a view to monetizing the AltNation Guide. And plenty of line-by-line hand checking of code for any poorly optimised sections, trying to reduce the load on the server, optimise the pages and just speed the silly thing up a bit. Investigating Facebook Platform...

phlogiston

"silence & tears"

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The Home Office

Posted 30th December 2007 at 5:48pm by phlogiston

Working from home is great. No commute, no boss looking over your shoulder, no dress code, no stress, no hassle. Most of the time that is.

Discipline can be awkward. Yesterday for example. The plan was to work straight through the day & night on optimising a couple of features for the AN Guide (geek: really couldn't justify loading 250K javascript on every New Thread page just on the occasional off chance it might be needed...).

It wasn't a big "pressure cooker"...

phlogiston

"silence & tears"

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The Future's Here, The Future's Purple

Posted 27th December 2007 at 11:13am by phlogiston

So after surprisingly few bugs found during the launch of the AN Guide (about two dozen, more than half cosmetic) I decided it was time to break stuff properly.

My intentions had been for a piece-by-piece roll out of additional options, starting with allowing everyone else to add their own gigs, shows, events, bands, whatevers but plans & intentions have never been favourites. Instead Christmas time was spent playing with new toys.

The new toys being the next version...

phlogiston

"silence & tears"

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The AN Guide - Launch Day

Posted 22nd December 2007 at 11:25am by phlogiston

I often find it difficult to stop. To decide when a feature set is enough. To decide that yes, now is the time to release a project to the world. I always want to tinker and improve just that little bit more...

The AltNation Guide has been the Everest of that procrastination but today after months of coding myself and a couple of weeks of testing live on altnation.com, "THE GUIDE" got shown to the world.

Ten minutes later I had found more than half a dozen issues...

phlogiston

"silence & tears"

Posted in Uncategorized

Comments 0 phlogiston is offline