broken, broken everywhere and nothing to drink...

Today began with a little bit of a rough start. We noticed that our server had been acting funny. Or at least it had been sending us weird error notifications.

This means that 25 or so users that signed up did not get the "confirmation e-mail" for signing up. We have since corrected this situation, and if you are one of the users that didn't know if he successfully signed up or not, check your inbox. =)

Big news, shhh, alpha version screenshot.

Well I guess we've made it through the first two and a half weeks. It has been a great ride. To culminate the end of our second official full week, we have a facebook group: http://utoronto.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2372638322

As a special surprise, we have an alpha version screen shot available there.

eggo my logo

I'm logo-ed up to my ears. For all you non ClutterMe users out there, something for eveyone.

L'Original



L'Original moins plus.


L'Original moin double plus.


Le petit oiseux de logo.



Logo besperitte plus moins.


Moin logo cette originality.


Logo original pour tout.



Oh, and due to some comedy of errors, we've been running blored and our alpha version of ClutterMe without enabling FastCGI. We've since corrected our mistake, you should notice faster load times.

call me... ClutterMe

Updates on the project:

My eyes burn from code. My ears ooze javascript. I'm one with my server.

Alex has been trying to get a nice log-in background for what seems like two days now. I'm not sure who is going to win, him or the application error codes that keep popping up like an old pimple before the prom. Leslie knows all about that.

We have contacted our logo expert, Peter Frost, and our new logo will be ready by Sunday.

Why are we getting a new logo? It's because we are changing the domain. That's right, hahagreat is no longer. We will now be known as clutterme.com. It's cute, relatively short, and relates to the site- something hahagreat didn't do.

Hahagreat will still redirect to our site, for now. In the future we might think of selling it, or making our next app with it. We don't see a use for it that does justice to its easy to remember-ness.

Canadian vs. American Entrepreneurial Attitude

We are trying to start this company with as little investment as possible. I am told this is typical of the Canadian entrepreneur. Whereas the American entrepreneur is glad to trade capital over % ownership.

I originally inferred this to mean that the Canadian entrepreneurs are just less willing to give up control. I thought this mindset was somewhat embarrassing to be quite honest. We were always told it was better to have 51% of a watermelon than 100% of a peanut.

My views, after having started up a company, have somewhat changed. I now see how it is MORE courageous to turn down investment. Perhaps investors are like the "landmark of achievement" that many small business strive for. To say no to the flattery of someone wanting to invest in you, the fancy dinners, being courted, well that takes more courage than many have.

After all, investors are in there to make money. They haven't done the work, they are spending someone else's money. If the Canadian entrepreneurial scene is unwilling to let these guys in well, let's just say I understand their attitude. Not being accepted is more a mark of pride in Canada than anything else.

A small Rails cheatsheet

We constantly forget the syntax to assign CSS classes to various Rails helpers. The general idea is that most helpers take two hashes (that's the part inside curly brackets) - the first hash has specific options for the helper, the second hash gets passed on to the resulting HTML code. Thus, pay special attention to the curly brackets.

Here's a quick cheat sheet:

A simple link:

<%= link_to "Link name", { :controller => 'controller_name',
                           :action => 'action_name' },
                           :class => 'someclass' %>

A more complicated link:

<%= link_to "Link name", { :controller => 'controller_name',
                           :action => 'action_name' },
                         { :class => 'someclass',
                           :id => 'css-id',
                           :confirm => "Are you sure?"} %>

An AJAX link:

<%= link_to_remote "Link name", {:update => "div_to_update",
                                 :complete => "js_on_complete",
                                 :url => { :action => 'action_name', :id => 'some_param' }},
                                {:class=>"someclass"}  %>

A simple form tag:

<% form_tag ({:controller => "controller_name",
              :action => "action_name"},
              :class => "someclass") do %>
   insert code
<% end %>

An AJAX form tag:

<% form_remote_tag :update => "div_to_update",
                   :complete => "js_on_complete",
                   :url => { :action => 'action_name', :id => 'some_param' },
                   :html => { :class=>"someclass" } do %>
   some content
<% end %>

A simple text field:

<%= text_field "object", "field", :class=>"someclass" %>

Submit tag:

<%= submit_tag "Submit", :class=>"someclass" %>

Text area:

<%= text_area "object", "field", :class=>"someclass" %>

move ...

I said move

The first week of our start-up just ended and let's recap...

1) We're making a customizable homepage
2) We're quitting our jobs (and in mark's case not looking for a job) to start this company.
3) We have given ourselves until August to make something good enough to release.

Our progress thus far,

We've.. well, set up this blog. No, but seriously, our code chest is moving along quite well. Since last Sunday (I'm writing this on Sunday night) we've worked 4 full days on the project and have probably spent the remaining three days thinking and planning the project. Everywhere we look on the web we keep wishing things had our interface. It IS that cool.

What about the title 'move' what does that have to do with anything? Well tonight is my first night at Alex's house. His family is great. We are probably going to go into a system where Sunday-Tuesday is spent at Alex's and Thursday-Saturday is spent at Mark's.



Alex has decided to keep going part time at his job until mid July, which means we probably won't have an amazing deliverable until mid-August.

We played some street hockey today for our break, we practiced tip-ins from the point.

here we go again,

It feels really good to be back at it again. The sun-is-a-shining and we're hacking away at our 19' inch LCD and 4 week old MacBook, Alex and Mark, respectively.

A personalized get well message goes out to our close friend and almost co-founder Derek Shaw who was involved in a terrible bicycle accident.

Derek, we both wish you a safe and speedy recovery.

In tech. news most of today is going to be spent documenting and coding. We need to precisely define our interface. A lot of our homepage interface hasn't been done before, so the code we are writing is going to be 100% original. We're not worried though, we code borrow in other parts of the site *cough cough*, we'll meet our quota. Getting it right the first time however is a major concern.

These guys get it, most of the time. What does 'getting it' mean? It means making a sexy and user friendly interface, making site navigation intuitive, and not putting off users with unneeded eye candy.

We're bringing sexy back to homepages.

Score of today's street hockey game: Mark 76, Alex 2. Only one fall each and numerous swears.

que pasol, que pasol

I just want to get back at it.

I hate standing around and blogging about our website. It's been 2 and a half days since Alex and I last worked full time on our start-up and it sucks. We cannot start a company if we let this much time pass between our productive work sessions.

I've been promised by Alex that this won't happen again, or at least it won't be like this till after mid-July but I can't help but question his commitment to the project.

In much funnier news, I feel like these guys...

Telling it like it is

Once again, Stephen Colbert is right on the money.



Thank you, Andrew, for bringing it to our attention.

Natural light, it burns!

I'm convinced that the only time to start a successful start-up (in Toronto, at least) is early summer. Being able to work outside, catching some sun, and going for a run or roller blading in the park when you feel your brain is getting full is amazing.

What's even more amazing is the feeling of clarity and focus, which only gets stronger every day. We shared our ideas early on with some of our friends, and since then the beast has grown and morphed in our minds... but in some indescribable way, it doesn't feel like it's changed (even though it has), it only feels like the details that have always been there are revealing themselves to us, one by one.

Toughest parts so far? Finding a "home run" domain name (I don't expect this to happen for another month or two). And for me (since I put on my project manager hat), finding a good task tracking tool. I went through maybe 30 options, and they were all either too basic, too elaborate, or not free (and not worth the money). In the end I settled on http://www.dotproject.net/, which has the advantage that I could set it up through our webhost's control panel. The interface is somewhat clumsy, but it'll do.

Since I'm the resident geek, I feel like a bit of technical babble is called for. And what better subject to babble about than the many benefits of Rails! (I can see other geek readers rolling their eyes right about now. Yes, you.)

This is nothing new to Rails users, but I always thought the way routing is handled is very neat. A very basic example is something like:

http://www.clutterme.com/pages/show?name=username

which we might want to condense to the much friendlier

http://www.clutterme.com/username

Nothing fancy, all it takes is the following in routes.rb:

map.connect ':name',
:controller => "pages",
:action => "show"

Now, the fun part is more complicated paths:

http://www.clutterme.com/users/account?name=username
http://www.clutterme.com/users/settings?name=username
etc.

would ideally go to:

http://www.clutterme.com/username/account
http://www.clutterme.com/username/settings
etc.

I expected this to be fairly complicated to do on top of the first rule, since I now have a parameter as the first part of the path, sometimes followed by an action, and the controller is inferred from the context. Yikes! Well, it's not all that complicated. All it took is one extra line in routes.rb:

map.connect ':name/:action',
:controller => "users"

The best part? I'm far from a Rails or routes.rb expert; the above code just "made sense", and it just worked. That's how computers are supposed to work.

missing our girlfriends

So we managed to eat half of Alex's birthday cake in less than two hours.

Not much news today in tech. advancement. Alex is still trying to get version 1.0 done (basic account functionality and sign up). We decided that the best approach would be to do the VERY lethargic and boring actions first.

I (mark) have been completely filling in the nuts and bolts of a releasable site. And we are both really excited. We have some new innovations that will let you talk to your loved ones without .. well, let's not spoil it here.

Peter Frost, our logo expert, has sent us the newest ClutterMe logos. We're quite excited about them.

Today is Alex's last day at my house before he goes back to work for three half days... what a maroon this kid is. In total I'd say I have 30 pages of edited and re-edited word document HLD (high level requirement documents) and Alex has about 30 new pages of code.

As I mentioned before, we have some new ideas and we're REALLY freakin' excited about them. So yes, the weekend was a moderate success. The next couple of days will encompass coding from home. What's on the menu for tonight? Great pun accomplished because it's dinner with Alex's parents.

I think the most important thing we got out of this weekend was DIRECTION. "It's invaluable"- says Alex. We almost have a defined site. The next major step will be to pick out a nice template for our User Accounts page and just keep hacking.

Code Chest Status: 0.1% full.

Trackback URL: Blogarama

Day Two

So big progress thus far... we've changed our blog address.


For more visibility and for users being able to leave comments we've switched from hosting our own blog (iWeb) to Blogger.com.

We hope the extra visibility from google and other bloggers will attract some more traffic to our blog.

Today is also one of our founders Birthday. Happy Birthday goes to Alex who turns 25 today. We're going out to celebrate, or at least we bought a cake.



In tech. notes there was and will be some more progress in the overall look of the main page. Perhaps tonight we could start 'adding friends'. Look for updates tonight for those with user accounts.