I wrote this yesterday, and Opera lost it with it’s weirdness, so I waited until today, breathing deeply, to write again.

Currently, I’m done with most of the side-project I had for July, and the rest should go quickly. That’s all well and good.

But here’s the dilemma: I have these ideas, in my head, like. Like Runimal, say. And some other ideas.  And a while ago, I had a pretty good idea, I think, that has ::gasp:: a revenue model, plus a ::hiccup:: potentially large market.

So I naturally want to write the shiny new thing. But is this just a sign that I can’t focus, or a smart switch to a better idea? So that’s what I’m thinking about. While redesigning the web site for an old product I released in 2006. I may be ADD.

Just thoughts. Mainly, Runimal is still where it was a month ago. And it’s dang hot in my office ;).

Been slaving away on a project for someone else that I promised to do and delayed all through June to work on Runimal. Naturally, Runimal is undone, so it’s now having its turn in the delay bin.

That saddens me, but what can you do? (Besides better scheduling, because of course that’s unrealistic.)

That’s my update. Runimal hasn’t progressed, and may not until the end of the month. Tradeoffs are lovely…

All seems to be going well with the active and vocal people who were doing well during the actual challenge month :). Lump me in with the quiet slacker majority.

Aw, man… Lost my brilliant post by pressing some stupid Opera key combination that took me off-page to help me translate to Spanish. Clicked back and all was blank (actually, the title was there.. Wow, thanks).

Anyhoo, Runimal is NOT done, but I’m not unhappy (except about my lost post). I have a lot of big functionality done, and a lot left, but the remainder is a lot of ‘implement the rest of the challenge types’, and ‘test email invites’, versus ‘figure out if I can do X’.

X is done, man, I’m just filling in the holes. Sometimes with live, squirming groundhogs. (That’s an apt metaphor for my Ruby code, actually. I’ll leave the dots for you to connect.)

And from a quick glance about the 30 day blogs, looks like I’m in good ‘no-launch-yet’ company, though many are much closer to it than I. :)

So I am, overall, well-pleased. The 30-day challenge served its purpose to get me out of bed at 5:30 AM for many days in a row. I maintained a pretty strict schedule where I spent evenings and Sundays hanging out with my wife (not working), and still managed to get further than I thought I would. So there you have it.

Oh, and I ‘learned’ RoR. I still don’t know much, but Ilikeitalot. High-fives all around.

And I’m no longer upset about my lost post. I got to work in groundhogs, so this one is obviously better.

Since of course you all wanted to see a random Photoshop mockup…

Feedback is welcome, but don’t be offended if I put off any substantial changes ’til post June, having spent a lot of precious development time on this as is.

Note that the two boxes shown won’t be in that order. You don’t choose your challengees until after you choose what type of challenge you’re doing (not shown), and fill in the challenge details. I just reversed it to confuse my competition :P.

As promised. :P

Enjoy the simplicity. Doesn’t even have the tagline (because all the ones I’ve come up with suck). I just pulled it from the page design. No promises on it not changing.

Wednesday and Thursday I opened up Photoshop and did some fun design work. The mockups I did earlier (in HTML/CSS) were starting to depress me. I like the new design a lot, but that’s how new designs are, eh? We’ll see when the flush of newness wears off.

Photoshop is fun for design work, since it’s easy to get visual ideas out on the page without worrying about which CSS rounded-corners method to choose, or why IE6 always adds extra space at the bottom of images unless you delete all white-space in your HTML (yeah, there’s other workarounds, but it boggles my mind when the whitespace in my markup screws up my page layout — curse you, IE6).

I recognize 37signals’ points, but I think I can safely ignore them, because they aren’t like, successful or anything, right? :)
Really, Photoshop helps me see the end result quickly, and iterate between design ideas in a way I can’t do quickly in HTML/CSS. And I like seeing that end result, man.

Their 2nd point is the major thing I need to look out for: Too much focus on details too early. It’s easy to have to have everything be perfect, and Photoshop makes it possible, but I have to remember that just about everything will change in translation to HTML anyway, so get the flow right and move on.

I also now have a first-draft logo, integrated with the site at the moment. I’ll post it when I get back to my home computer (writing this on lunch@work). We’ll see how it works when I break it out of my current design.

This design work means I haven’t been getting ‘real’ work done on functionality, which is veryvery dangerous. It’s (roughly) the middle of the month, had you noticed?
On that front, though, I really have been making some steps forward. I’ve been able to read a bunch of the Agile Web Development with Rails book in slow moments at work, and it’s really good. I was a bit concerned about the focus on an earlier Rails version, but I’ve been able to mentally convert and apply everything, and it’s helped a lot with grasping the Rails concepts, as well as exposing me to more Ruby syntax, which is good.
ALSO have done some more thinking about how users will interact with the site, create challenges and so on. There are a lot of conceptual parallels between Runimal and the challenge part of Nike+’s site that ties in with their running sensor thing — hearing second-hand about what Nike was trying to do actually gave me the initial idea for Runimal. I hadn’t gone to actually look at what they’re doing, though, until yesterday. It was helpful to see how they’ve laid everything out. I think Runimal’s current approach is more flexible, but could probably be less confusing with a more wizardy interface. I’m also switching to a 100% Flash interface. Just kidding.

In a bootstrapped microISV effort such as mine, one of the combined blessings/curses is the need for me to actually do everything. I know, there’s outsourcing and all that, but in my case, ‘bootstrapped’ means ‘moneyless’, so it’s me or no one. This is probably the biggest barrier to someone looking at starting a indiestartupmicroISV, but at the same time one of the liberating parts that keep it interesting once you’re there.

My natural bent is toward code; I consider myself a programmer above a designer, marketer, copywriter, train conductor, and so on. Luckily, perhaps, I have interest in all those areas, so my life hasn’t been a total waste as far as preparation. I’ve designed a few sites for friends (which puts me up there with happycog, I’d say), read things about marketing/adwords/SEO (thanks, Patrick), written… before, and helmed the #12 down from Richmond to Fairfax a time or two.

So I’m looking forward to gaining some practical skill in all those different areas. I’ve seen in me day job the perils of limiting yourself completely to one aspect or the other (“I Only Do Code, you have to go through marketing/management/meetings, then just come and tell me what it should look like”). That’s a great technique for work avoidance, but doesn’t help us who actually want to contribute in different areas.

So there you go, I guess my point boils down to: If you’re by yourself, you have to do everything. Wow.

Runimal! Yesterday, worked mainly on the challengee relationship between the Users and Challenges tables. Wearing the DB-guy hat, and the Rails-hat, neither of which fits me perfectly, yet. I think I just need to use has_and_belongs_to_many, even though I was pretty sure challengees would just belong_to_many, but that doesn’t exist without has_and. Which makes a certain sense.

But that was fun. Today, more work on challenges.

Left Friday afternoon (from Richmond) to drive to Northern VA to go to my cousin’s rehearsal dinner. Stayed up there Sat. night, went to her wedding that afternoon, came home. Got the usual nothing done on Sunday (played softball :P — 102 degrees F — why?).

Now to get something done.

I think the Day Log page is a bit redundant. This is a blog, daily posts are what it’s for. :P
I’ll retire it and move the content up sometime soon.

Today I mainly did more work on the design of the Create a Challenge page. It’s the main feature of my app, so it’s the most important design piece. Hopefully my layout (sketched quickly on a notepad) works. Didn’t do any more backend code.

The colors and stuff still look terrible, so I’ll have to eventually sit down and focus on those. I have some base colors in my mockups I can use, but I think a good accent color would do wonders. Colors are a bit difficult for me, since I have a touch of color-blindness (can’t see the numbers in the circles at the eye doctor). It works out okay, though — don’t be expecting some wild clashing monstrosity. :P

My head tells me I need to nail down functionality before colors, but another part of my head tells me that having a pretty design will make me happier when I look at it, and happier == more productive. Einstein said that.

The other 30dayer’s projects are looking really interesting. Like Scott said, the variety and scope of projects is impressive. Looking forward to adding Runimal to the list of ‘winners’ (in the Nanowrimo sense) come July 1st.

Following along with the crowd, here’s some more details about my project.

Runimal is based on a simple premise: Competition motivates people. I’m taking that idea as it applies to running, and combining it with the Awesome Power Of The Internet to make it easier to compete*.

The ‘problem’ with running and competing is that you generally have to a) live in the same vicinity, b) be able to fit the same times into your schedule, c) have a place that’s mutually convenient and works for your running style or workout, etcetera. Basically, you have to be in the same place at the same time with your fellow runner[s] to be able to compete, or build off of each other.

Runimal solves that problem by letting you create challenges online, and send them to your friends. Once you’re signed up, you come to the site after each run and input it into the application. The run is applied to your challenges and everyone in that challenge is updated with the new data. This lets everyone see at a glance vital things like “who’s winning,” and “what do I need to do to win?”
All with appropriately beautiful graphs and charts, of course.

That’s the start of the idea, and the sum total of what I want to have implemented by month’s end.
Notes:
Though I say ‘competition’, I very much want to target more casual, collaborative users as well; not so much “I’ll be the first to run a 7-minute mile” as “Let’s track our running and see if we can do thirty consecutive two-mile days.” I toss around competition/challenge/goal interchangeably right now — I’ll firm up my message for the actual site, and make sure everyone feels included. ;)