Status report and new goals

A while back I found (and delicious’d) a post from the fellow that built Mingle², a free Web 2.0 dating site. It was an endeavor very similar to mine, only set two years in the past. He did a lot of the same things I’m doing now: identifying an opportunity, getting ideas, having a laser-like focus on the must-have features, designing before developing, using a framework, etc. Like me, he was also trying to build the site in his off-hours. He was able to do it in 66.5 hours. I… I won’t come anywhere close to that. But in my defense, he’d built five sites using his rapid-development framework before, and I’ve built zero.

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.