Eleven days ago I posted about Priorities, Scheduling, Running, Etc. In that post I outlined two major Maker's projects that I couldn't seem to complete. Well, the support that my friends and family provided after that post got me to push through to today... I'm launching a public test version of V2. It'll be FAIL in short order, but at least it's out there and more or less running.
What you see above is the new Flash embed widget. It's not all that much sexier than the old one. In fact, in some ways it's a lot uglier (I hate those buttons at the bottom.) But it's written in a way that gives us the ability to serve video and images. And the questions/answers themselves are a lot prettier. And server-side performance is improved (yeah, that's pretty much the kiss of death and I'm sure I'll be up all night with server FAIL now.) It uses a fluid layout technique so it can go from fullscreen to tall and thin just by changing the html embed code. The Flash is now a single file which calls the server for some XML to tell it what to do. Each question type is an Actionscript class. Etc. Etc.
One of the very complex parts of this build is that I have to support V1 concurrently. I couldn't just sunset that functionality. We've got 25,000,000 impressions a year spread out over hundreds of thousands of urls. So the system has to operate in one of two modes. I've gotten better at the architecture side of things (lots of mistakes over many years) so the break is clean but it's still more work.
We'll run V2 with some test convos for a while. Get feedback. Wait for the inevitable FAIL, cry a little and fix things. For clients of course we'll stick with V1 for now.
Moving forward the new Flash codebase makes possible a lot more things. I want to push a lot more functionality to the in-blog widget. Of course, I want a lot of features. Gotta get out there to sell them first!
So that's one down, one to go. Up next is the pingFit V2 stuff. It'll take some time to get dNeero's stuff settled but I've been devoting two to three hours a day to moving pingFit along.
The support everybody's offered has been great. Fingers crossed I'll get things done soon enough so that I can go into 100% sales mode.
Three Months to Ironman Florida 2007 Plan