For anyone that is considering getting married in the future, I have to say that eloping* is definitely the way to go. You only have to worry about yourselves and that makes everything ridiculously easier. There’s only two people to please instead of 100+. In that same vein I wish we’d done something simpler for the reception. Our dinner, while fantastic, would have been much less stress-inducing with a simple buffet or cocktail party. And if you have a child or children, leave them with the grandparents (or hire a sitter) the evening before and the day of your wedding/reception. The two of you will have enough to worry about without your kids running around demanding your attention.

In an upcoming post I’ll talk about the future of scotchel.com and where I’m headed next.

*I just looked up elope and the one of the first definitions is to run off secretly to get married, usually without the consent of one’s parents. To be clear, we did have the consent of our parents. I wonder if there’s a similar word that is with consent. And not secretly.

An October release looms close; I’m not sure I’ll make it with the time lost switching to Rails, but I still think it was ultimately the right decision to switch. RoR has been much more enjoyable to program in. I write less code yet accomplish more. Plugging in various bits of code is a breeze. It makes me wish I’d taken a look at RoR a few years ago.

Anyway, since I’m not good at writing about myself I tried to think of inventive ways that I could write about myself from a different perspective. And then I remembered reading an article on How to Hack Someone’s Mind. And I thought, hey, why can’t I hack my own mind?

And so I did. I started reviewing all of the bookmarks I’d saved to delicious while making notes on the categories and themes of the articles. I came to recognize that:

• I’m a frugal entrepreneur trying to create a site in an established market (an underdog)
• I’m a self-starter planning to develop the site myself (programming and design)
• I’m planning to market the site using primarily social media

Sounds about right to me. Makes me wish I’d been using delicious back when I was dating — it would’ve made creating profiles roughly 27 times easier.

I’m beginning to see how you could build such a site in under 70 hours though. So far the majority of my time has been devoted to setting up the registration, login, and forgot password pages. This is all code I could reuse for future projects. Plus, anything that has tripped me up so far I would have learned from and wouldn’t be likely to repeat. It actually makes me slightly excited about pursuing future projects with what I know now… but I won’t let that stop me from completing this project.

Anyway, back in April I said that I would launch in June. That was always a highly ambitious date, one I’d set to push myself to do as much as I could as quickly as possible. It’s June now, and while it’s only the beginning of the month, building out all of the remaining functionality in the next 25 days seems unlikely. I need to complete all of the following sections:

• Authentication
  • Registration
  • Login
  • Forgot Password
• Search/Search Results
• Profiles
  • Edit
  • View
• Photos
  • Upload
  • Manage
• Mail
  • Inbox
  • View Message
  • Write Message
• Rate the Date
• General polish/AJAX

Those are in approximately the order I intend to complete them.

Let’s do a quick and dirty calculation. Assume that every piece takes equal time (they won’t, but it’s something to work with). I’ve completed three out of 13 pieces in 1.5 months. That means I’m nearly 25% done and at my current rate I’d finish the rest of the site in approximately 5 months. I don’t know about you, but my odds of completing the site in 25 days are looking a wee bit slim. I’d need to quintuple the amount of time I’ve been spending on the project to come anywhere close to completing it in 25 days.

Five months would place me firmly in October. That seems realistic, but I’d like to get people using my site before then. So let’s shoot for launching a beta of the site in August. I wanted to have a beta before launch all along anyhow, and this gives me a couple new goals to shoot for.

As much as I love working on my website there are days when I would really rather be doing something else. Such as, for instance, when some new downloadable content comes out for a game and I’d rather be playing that than programming. It happens. So how do I keep motivated?

I’ve started many projects previously and I have a very bad habit of starting a project only to get halfway through it and start on a new, different project. But I’ve been doing something different this time, and it’s working to my advantage: blogging. As simple as it sounds, keeping a blogging schedule has led me to make constant, steady progress on my site. By requiring myself to post something new every few days I have to make progress on the site, otherwise I have nothing to blog about. And there’s always something worth blogging about, whether it’s discussing how I solved a problem, or implemented a new technology, or mockups I created for a page I’m going to build, etc. There’s always something new, but only if I’ve been working on my site. Blogging about what I’m working on is definitely a practice I’ll take with me on other projects I work on (but not before I’m done with this one!).

Anyway, while I was building out the registration forms for the site I realized that I was not moving fast enough (yet again). I was diving into all sorts of intricacies of form validation when I knew there had to be a much easier way to do it. I needed a framework that could do the heavy lifting leaving me to simply build out the pages on the site without having to write so much code. I stumbled upon a couple solutions, one being CakePHP and the other CodeIgniter. After studying them both I decided upon using CodeIgniter, mainly because it seemed faster, smaller, and easier to use.* It many ways it feels like an extension to PHP, providing a vast array of tools without requiring you to use any of them. And their documentation supports that. You can easily grab a class or a helper, quickly reference it, complete the task you’re on and move right on to the next thing.

After completing the registration form I’ll need to take a quick detour and work on the style for a bit. I’ve toyed around with a couple styling possibilities, but I need to solidify something soon or else I’m going to have to come back later and update the classes on every tag on every page. That doesn’t sound like fun.

*Note that this is entirely based on my perception, not reality, as I’ve not had the time to play with them both fully. Your mileage may vary.

Goals also help you to focus your efforts. They give you something to aim for and give you the means to adjust your plans if you’re not on track. One of my goals is to launch my website in June. I’ve been a little loose about that, it may be June 1st or June 30th, but it’s about two months from now give or take a bit.

I realized that with all of my work with CouchDB that I wasn’t making much real progress. Nearly three weeks of effort with nothing to show for it. Sure, I learned a lot, but I hadn’t built a single page yet. That’s when it occurred to me that I should just start building even if it’s not in the most optimal fashion. I know how to work with MySQL databases. I can use MySQL for now and migrate the data later if/when it becomes necessary. After all, no one will know the difference except for me!