The consensus wasn’t to go live with the new site straight away after all but to create a better impression on the public by waiting on the final design and within no time at all Jordan had worked his graphical magic and delivered the goods. I was supplied with a .psd mockup and got busy with Photoshop. I hadn’t used this app in a while and it took some time to relearn how to use it but I managed to cut things up and proceeded to get stuck into the CSS.
I’m preparing to push my code for the new Infurious site into production so we can start selling our first application, Rickshaw. The site’s not too pretty but It Works and our freshly recruited designer Jordan has some interesting ideas for the next iteration. All the important stuff is present: people can download Rickshaw, purchase a license and the license details will be generated and mailed out to them. I’ve just had a dry run of this scenario and it all looks good.
I met my co-conspirator Aidan in person for the first time today. He’s over here in sunny Belfast for a while and is working up on the third floor of the same building as myself, so we had a bit of lunch and got chatting about our plans for the future, our experiences of working for $BIG_CORP and life in general. It was good to finally put a physical person to the online persona and apparently neither of us looks like the photos we use as avatars ;)
Just a quick update on what I’ve been working on for Infurious recently. Since finishing up on configuring Jabber I’ve been developing our website with the specific aim of allowing customers to download our products and purchase licenses for them. For this I’ve returned to CakePHP and been tinkering with the PHP portion of the AquaticPrime framework which Aidan has implemented in our upcoming application, Rickshaw. Other highlights have been working with the PayPal Sandbox and writing a component which generates “Buy Now” buttons for our apps and then handles the Instant Payment Notification and Payment Data Transfer callbacks once the transaction has been completed.
After a lot of frustration, reading of documentation and even giving up completely on certain paths of action I finally got Jabber up and running. The “Jabber burnout” as Adian called it was terrible and only now do I feel de-stressed enough to write about it. I initially setup an installation of jabberd2 as I have had previous experience with it and was comfortable with it’s administration. I got it working without difficulty and could connect to it via a standalone client but ended up abandoning it when I tried to get a web interface working with it.
I’m writing this on the shiny iMac Matt dropped off the other night. As it stood, I was the only guy in Infurious not on the Mac platform, which is a pretty fundamental prerequisite for working in a Mac shop, don’t you think? I’m having to get re-used to the keyboard again and the mouse is giving me some difficulty which might just be due to the mouse itself, but all-in-all it’s been a not-unpleasant experience so far!
As I previously mentioned, my current task as Infurious system admin is providing the team with a bug/task tracking system, namely Trac. My initial thought was: “our server runs Ubuntu, this should be easy…” I could get Trac running via tracd and I could see that mod_python was working via mod_python.testhandler but the two didn’t seem to want to play together. Last night, after much frustration, I just gave up and configured Trac to run as a CGI application.
It’s been a busy week. The lads and myself have been quite industrious, making plans and Getting Things Done. I’ve taken on responsibility of taking care of the Linux side of things and last night finished setting up an SSL enhanced, WebDAV accessible Subversion repository, for which Aidan has written an introductory guide. My current task is getting Trac installed and I’m quite enjoying being up to my elbows in command line goodness.