Like most developers I do most of my work locally and then deploy to a live server. Which means, with the exception of this dev blog snagg.net gets little to no traffic. What am I going on about?… well, even after switching over to DreamHost P.S. more often that I would like the site is down. What should I expect when things go live and there’s tons of multimedia files and database queries?
As with a lot of projects there are some problems you just cannot predict. Nevertheless, I overcame most of them and at the same time rethought the manner in which I am going to launch the site.
Being a perfectionist I have a very difficult time releasing a product until every i’s dotted - call it a gift and a curse (meaning I’ve been laboring over pixels like you can’t imagine).
The site on my test server is about 30-35% complete, so what I am going to do is very soon roll out the absolute bare bones version of the site and make frequent updates. This works for me in that I can perfect smaller increments much more efficiently than I can the entire release.
OK, so I am going to update the progress meter over there and get my ass back to work :).
By the way, when I say bare bones I mean bare bones.
BuddyPress has been acquired by Automattic and I am really interested in whats going to come out of this. As you know snagg will be a community built on wordpress and it looks to me that the development stage is going to be easier… right at the time I was seriously considering a shift to drupal.
I came up with the idea pf snagg about 2 years ago. It’s amazing how much time you can lose by procrastinating - now I’m not the only one trying build a sports fan network. Nevertheless… I’m doing it anyway :), competition is key. More importantly however is knowing your competition. So from what I can tell the following sites are what I consider to be in the ballpark of what I plan on doing.
http://bleacherreport.com
http://armchairgm.com
http://sportsnipe.com
My goal is to take my one man army and make something better than all of these combined and do it with WordPress *gulp*.
I’ve registered for accounts on all and I plan to use them and LEARN from them - the worst thing I can do in this situation is believe that my ideas are perfect. I am actually going to write reviews on these sites after a couple weeks use… stay tuned.
Why do youtube video owners with a crap ton of views disable the embed code functionality? Please… explain this to me, I dare you.
…Just start it!
This is in reference to podcasts and videocasts. I am in the middle of developing several podcasts and a videocast for snagg and the original plan was not to launch them until the site was good to go. However, while doing my homework on both mediums I found a common motto is to just launch your show (of course not a crappy one), build an audience and then use them to promote your website and not the other way around.
So I thought about that and came to the realization that in the current way I absorb information, audio and video are the most effective advertising platforms, with text being a distant 3rd simply because it is the most difficult form of compression to decode. That said, I have decided to green light my show ideas which will probably go live in about 2 weeks, at least a full month before the expected snagg.net launch.
If any of you readers are looking for good podcast resources visit the podcast academy, listen to the presentations and follow through to some of the speaker’s sites and you will find helpful tip after helpful tip…. I promise 
A simple and clean user interface is very important to me - in my opinion it goes almost hand in hand with content and sense snagg at some point will be very dependent on user generated content, this puts even greater emphasis on UI. Let’s face it, when someone visits your site that is lead there by a search engine, after seeing what they’ve come for you have maybe 2-3 seconds to grab their attention and keep them clicking to other parts of your site. Also, registered members of your site will spend much more time there, be more productive and are more likely to tell their friends go there because “it’s so easy to use“.
Making something that is simple, clean and easy to use is inversely proportional to how difficult the implementation will be; i.e. it’s much harder to build a website that appears easy to use and not overwhelming. You will know you’ve done your job when less people need to view your demo tour. I know that in a lot of cases demo tours are necessary but for what I’m doing with snagg I would feel complete the second I don’t need one.
Of course, there are a lot of ways to perfect your UI. The simplest way is to track/learn how you and others use the site and adjust accordingly, keeping in mind that if something appears slightly cluttered to you it definitely appears cluttered to users. Secondly with ajax you can hide elements that are not frequently used and keep them in a sense one click away for when needed without requiring page reloads - note that gratuitous use of ajax is just silly. The most difficult aspect I think is figuring the out the correct balance of text/images/video based on your audience. A specific example in my case is, when users go to what will be for example snagg.net/nfl would it be better to have the team listing as text links or should I use the team logos instead?
On the flip side, spending so much time making every pixel count can greatly extend your delivery date. That’s why it’s not so wrong to release something that is a little rough around the edges (by your standards) just as long as you actually release, and release often.
I’m saying all this to say that this is why I am spending so much time on mock-ups. Here’s an example of what I would like the logged in users to see at the top of every page they visit:
…to the point, nothing more, I cannot begin to tell you how many sports sites get this so wrong.
nuff said.
1. Originally I was planning on using bbpress for the forums on my site, but at the moment I am torn between punbb and vbulletin… they are just so much more extensible.
2. Now that I’ve decided on a way to manage videos (which I’ll write about later) it’s now time to find an image management solution - this is harder than it seems. For past projects I used Lussumo File Browser… but right now, I have no idea what I’m going to do.
Made a quick progress bar of how far along I felt I was from being done and ready for a private beta launch. I’ll probably put it here in the side bar or at the very top of the page. It’s kind of a reminder to keep grinding away.
9%
I am a Dreamhost customer as well as an Amazon S3 customer. There are advantages to both; Dreamhost is really cheap, and Amazon S3 is horsepower on demand. So think of Dreamhost as the sports car and Amazon S3 a big ass supercharger.
Nevertheless, as dependable as S3 is as a cdn, having to use http://bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com/file.ext sucks. So in the the below screencast I show how you can change this to look more “professional” by virtual hosting and then that same file becomes something like http://files.yoursite.com/file.ext.
This screencast assumes you are both an Amazon S3, and Dreamhost customer, however this process will work fir anyone as long as you know how to change your CNAME records.
Screencast Notes
Reference Article:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/2006-03-01/VirtualHosting.html
Dreamhost:http://dreamhost.com
Amazon s3: http://amazon.com/s3
1. Overthinking - sometimes it is just that simple
2. Deviating from the road map - it’s ok to stray for a while, but come back!
3. Adding to the road map - I mean after hours days of planning, if it’s not a bug fix it can wait until v2.0
4. Youtube - I swear, I went there for a specific reason (which I’ll write about later)… that was 2.5 hours ago
I like late night hardcore 4-5 hour sessions, I am always amazed at how much work gets done. Last night was one such session… or so it was supposed to be. Dreamhost pretty much crapped out last night and that was really throwing a wrench in my plans ahh well next time. For what I plan on doing with snagg I really need to think about making a move to mediatemple or something, but that’s a later day decision.
Question: How many of you run or know “big sites” hosted on dream host?
Nevertheless I still got some work done, I ended up doing some testing locally specifically integrating three different WordPress installs, did some research on redesigning the backend (i.e. simplify things with and change the css) without hacking up core, also started work on some mock ups for the site and finished the static splash page that will be on snagg until the sites done - haven’t posted it yet but here’s a whiteboard.
Hopefully today will go a little better.
This development blog follows the building of http://snagg.net.
What is snagg?
Well, it has been a couple of things. The word snagg comes from sports news aggregator. So yes it will be a sports site. Initially however it started out as a sports blog but quickly I realized going down that route was not what I had envisioned for snagg it definitely needed a community/social element.
Behind the Scenes
This will follow my molding of WordPress into a CMS along with WPMU and bbpress integration for the social aspect along with other pieces of software to make everything gel. I will definitely be posting writeups and maybe even some screencasts of work arounds for problems I run into that may help other WordPress developers out there.
So, off I go… wish me luck.