At the end of my last WhatIWantMost post (about 3-1/2 months ago) I wrote that the site was getting close to being good enough and that I had hoped to roll it out soon. Over the following month I asked some friends and colleagues to review the site and provide feedback. Afterward I implemented some changes and cleaned quite a few things up.
This is the post that I have wanted to make for quite some time but have been dreading somewhat as well. I’m not much of a bragger and I’m a bit of an introvert so these things don’t come natural to me (other than the occasional “hey check out this cool thing” IM). Actually I sometimes wonder how I’ve been able to blog as much as I have - I guess I see blogging as nothing more than writing stories and writing has always come fairly natural to me.
Anyway, back to the point, WhatIWantMost is now live. It has been live for about two months. See what I mean about “dreading this post”? I had decided to do a “quiet launch” and see what happened. Traffic has been slow but steady and the site seems to be doing what it is supposed to.
The site is still labeled “alpha” rather than beta because all the planned functionality is not baked in yet. In fact, I have not really done any active development other than some bug fixes here and there in over four months. However, the main pieces are in place and what is there seems to work well. I think it’s good enough for launch to gather initial feedback otherwise I would not have launched it.
Feel free to poke around and provide any feedback to whatiwantmost@danhounshell.com (there is not a feedback form on the site yet, but it is one of the highest priority items on my to-do list).
My initial goal for the project was “To create a production-worthy web site using as much code/database generation and automation as possible.” To do so I based the project on .netTiers and CodeSmith. I’m really pleased with .netTiers and CodeSmith is even further cemented in my toolbox. Along the way I got a pretty good introduction to ASP.NET AJAX and I took a couple of side journeys deep into web-based advertising and integrating third party web services (Amazon, Ebay, and Yahoo to name a few). I even created a couple of advertising and product search tools that I can use in other projects. Though I don’t feel that this project/journey is complete, my initial project and personal goals have been met.
I hope my blog series about developing the site has been as useful and entertaining for you as it has for me.