To do list

Last night I made a big to do list, and tonight I completed a few items. Lots more to do, including some significant functionality, but at least I have a known target for launch now.

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Twitter integration

Made some great progress today but then hit a brick wall. I got some Twitter integration working, where the user enters their twitter username/password, then a random key is sent to their stream (can't send a DM to themselves which would've been preferred). This key is then entered in to the details page of the app tp verify that the users has access to the Twitter account they say they do. This was to be the first step towards integrating with Twitter, and it worked on my dev box. However once it went live on App Engine, I found out that Twitter rejects all update requests that have the Referer header set. Unfortunately, App Engine sets this header and you can't modify it for security reasons, so this functionality will have to be parked for now until Twitter makes a change (fingers crossed).

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Movie night

Gonna watch at least 1 movie tonight. I'll either do some work after that or else watch another one then bed.

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Spinny thing

Added a wait spinner when retrieving replies, updated left side bar to show Google ads, and worked on a few graphics.

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AoC

Played AoC tonight .. not bad. Will get stuck in to likes tomorrow night.

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Not much tonight

No coding tonight, just read blogs and sent the odd email (related to my project). Will lprobably watch a movie now. I have been fixing some minor issues around the refactoring and caching stuff I did earlier. Next big step is to add likes, faves (watched items), and notification channels. I might do one or the other on Wednesday. Not likely to get much done tomorrow night as I need to catch up on some rest.

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Caching

Add a whole bunch of caching (using memcache) and also did some refactoring of the code last night. All up about 3 hours work. Will probably chill with some sports on telly tonight.

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Downtime

Need to relax tonight, either with XBox or Movies.

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Stats

Added some stat tracking for URLs today. Fairly cool, will list the top 20 stats. Should also be easy to search a URL and see how many times it was mentioned. Didn't do much more, but should get stuck into notifications on the weekend.

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Research

Updated to Flock 2.0b, but now the app only shows a blank page :( I think it's probably something to do with the DTD tag but will investigate tomorrow night. Spent a few hours researching video, SMS and XMPP for the app and 2/3 look good. Have also had an idea to add a message type: notifications. Users will be able to add 'channels' that people can subscribe to and then send notifications to the channel subscribers. This works around the problem of link spam as it's more of a permission-based model.

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Automated testing

I ran some auto tests last night and then some more today. Got an exception after 10k messages last night, and after 5k during the day. Most likely just a blip in the Google service more than a bug. After loading up with messages, the search for tags and text is still fast, so it's looking good. I would still like to do some sort of concurrent users testing, but I'm not sure how viable that will prove to be.

I am concerned about that limits that Google places on App Engine, especially with regards to processing cycles and database storage (only 500 Mb). It is possible to buy more, so thats not the issue, it's the cost and working out a model so that I don't have to pay :) At medium usage, the database shouldn't fill up too fast, but if it goes viral I'm not sure about the costs, and if the increase in usage/ad dollars will cover it. Only 1 way to find out I guess ...

Tonight has mostly been research and trying to setup App Engine to point to my top level domain.

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Stealth availability

Worked for around 3 hours last night. I put the site up live for a tester to have a look at, and also to see how it would work running on the proper AppEngine stack. I'm going to try and load the live site up with messages tonight and see if it still performs.

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More progress

Made some more progress after the Rugby ... about 2 hours tonight plus 2 hours during Jas' nap time. The UI is taking longer than expected, I suspect mostly because I'm not a UI specialist. Of course, I did spend a while searching through iStockPhoto for some icons :)

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More sport

Nothing done last night. Watched the NBA finals game 4 then played some Team Fortress 2 on the XBox. Was lots of fun :)

Am working now while daughter is napping, so I'm hoping to get a fair whack done. There's some Rugby Union on tonight, and I'm afraid I may be tempted to play TF2 again when it's over so I'm not holding out any great hopes for tonight. Still on track to possibly get an alpha version up this weekend.

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3 whole hours

I managed 3 hours of dev tonight. Progress on the UI is about 40% complete. I have some nice CSS panels happening now. I still have a fair way to go; next up is formatting the message input and lists.

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Sport

State of Origin Rugby League and NBA finals game 3 on telly tonight so no progress made :)

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The UI adventure begins

Finished off the reply threading tonight ... took about 30 mins. I'm going to mock up some UI ideas now. The plan is to work on the UI for the rest of the week and then maybe set the app loose in the wild for some friends to try out.

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Replies

Sorted replies today, over the course of 3 hours. I've not only coded a way to link all items, but have made an AJAX method so that replies can be viewed inline and expanded. Kewl!!

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Relaxing

Relaxing tonight after my daughter's 3rd birthday party. Too brain dead to work, so going to chill out.

Overall, the nuts and bolts of the app are there. I'll work on the UI next, then maybe add some Twitter integration if I feel it's needed. It may be a week before I get going again, as I tend to mull over UI designs in my head before I finally settle on a direction.

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Reply threading

Only spent 30 mins tonight reading blogs and writing some reply threading code. It's my daughters birthday tomorrow so I need to do a few chores, then I'm going to XBox360 it for a little while then head to bed.

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No progress

Caught up on my blog reading and now about to XBox360 it up until the League is on telly at midnight. I have put some thought around the new direction for my micro-blogging app, and I think I'll try and focus on conversations. As I said before, most of the building blocks I need are in place, so I'll mainly need to concentrate on the UI.

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Status

Watched a movie last night and am going to probably play XBox360 tonight. I think I'll rethink my complete Twitter clone strategy and perhaps tackle the micro-blogging idea a little different. I'll keep all the building blocks I've already created, but I will use a different UI. I'll also probably scrap twitter integration other than perhaps double posting and import of twitter friends. I'm definitely going to include XMPP though, most likely as a premium add.

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More productive

Did about 1 1/2 hours tonight. Tired but satisfied. I now have friends and followers working well ... just need to add a delete function to remove friends, and a block to block followers. It took a little while to work out the best way to use BigTable, but I got there. Of course there's no guarantee how well it will all work when friend lists get into the thousands (or even hundreds for that matter), but then that's part of the experiment really.

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A little coding

Only about 30mins invested tonight in actual coding. Just coded a view function for viewing a users profile, though this is still unfinished as I want it to get the user to view from the URL rather than a get param.

I also did a bit of research in to XMPP and REST. I'm not sure I want a full RESTful service, but I think getting XMPP to work will be a good challenge and also something that will be a killer feature if it scales. I believe that AppEngine will soon be making memcache available so I'll hope to make good use of that to offset an expected deluge of XMPP requests.

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Resting

No progress last night (watched sport and a movie) or tonight (watched sport and caught up with blogs).

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