Along with applying more and more improvements inspired by recent feedback, I’ve been enabling IE6 for all functionality. Previously, I’ve been disabling nearly all javascript and ajax functionality in IE6 because it was rather odd.
Fortunately, in getting IE6 to work, I’ve improved the code
base in general. Even the stupidest looking challenges can be surprising opportunities, I suppose.
It’s beginning to look like a mid-February 1.0 launch will be more than likely.
nshrine.com has been hosted on dreamhost during this early stage of development. Several times it has become paralysed by others’ use of the shared host, which is certainly acceptable for the price. This, however, won’t work for nshrine’s near future.
I’ve considered dreamhostps as a smooth transition. It has the added benefit of being “managed”, insofar as they’ll keep the software end maintained for me. Still, this is a new program for dreamhost, and I haven’t liked very much how they’ve handled the bumps of growth in the past. Add to this the fact that the price is high for this stage, and I keep looking.
Though I want to give EC2 a shot, and probably will at some point. I doubt that the overhead of maintaining instance(s) ( plus whatever else may go with a beta service) is something I can handle at this point.
Fortunately slicehost is no longer invite-only, and comes highly-recommended. They have a low-cost entry point and a great record. Though it’ll be an added drag to maintain a webserver, mysql server, and (possibly) mail server on a site built to run on vanilla installs, there’re just too many benefits to this approach. This will, of course, get me out of the vanilla constraints, as well.
Perhaps a mail-to-shrine facility will become a feature?
I played a bit with getting nshrine hooked up with twitter. It was amusing and made it so that direct messages to twitter user ‘nshrine’ would go into a twitter shrine. Though this shows some promise and utility, I wasn’t happy with the fact that the nshrine user had to follow another user before receiving direct messages from them, though I completely agree with twitter’s decision to make this limitation. Once nshrine gets a bit more popular, I’ll hook this up again and make it so that the nshrine member with autofollow anyone following it. Right now, there’s no reason to be hitting twitter’s servers that much.
I’m still getting great feedback from some of the beta testers. Do let me know if you’ve found any bugs or confusing bits.
I’ve received a lot of good comments, particularly regarding the awkwardness of registration/logging in for the first time. I hope to have things smoothed out soon.
Keep the comments coming! artwells@nshrine.com
The launch on the 21st was a success. The initial round of errors were mostly typos . (Note: Don’t drop ‘Proofreading’ from launch checklist.)
At any rate, it seems like even the fancy OpenID login bits worked as expected. Some shrines have been created, and all the major browser groups have been able to make the site work.
Next on the list is to prettify the design a bit, add some help, or tours, or at least a feature list, and then on to creating the premium features (which all the early beta testers are going to have for free, btw).
Watch this space for more.
I think tomorrow will be the day I invite others to see nshrine. This has been well over a year in playing. Tomorrow may be a very good day.