Week 1 at Suneido.com
After Thursday's peak, the downloads dropped off to about
10 a day over the weekend, probably because the
announcements all fell off the news pages. Of course it
was a long weekend as well, but programmers aren't supposed
to take weekends off, are they? One good thing about the
reduced traffic was that I had less distractions and I
actually got a "Getting Started" guide finished. And
finally, after 8pm on Monday night, I uploaded the new
version to the website. Tried to do a good job of testing
everything, but it's always a little scary releasing a new
version. Especially at this stage, when people are
downloading it for the first time, you want it to work!
I'm hoping that the "Getting Started" guide will help
people to get over the initial hurdle of a new system.
There's probably more I should add to it, but it's a
start. It also made me clean up a few odds and ends in
Suneido because it was easier to fix the program than to
document the awkward behavior! Being forced to work
through building a simple application also renewed my
perspective on Suneido. It's hard to see the big picture
when you're buried deep in the code. Overall, I think it's
looking pretty good. Still lots of rough edges and a few
potholes, but definitely getting there.
I remembered NewsForge (www.newsforge.com) and posted an
announcement there, and also got news items onto Dr. Dobbs
(www.ddj.com) and Software Development (www.sdmagazine.com)
so the traffic has picked up a little - 28 downloads today
as of 4pm. That brings us to 184 downloads in the first
week. I'm happy with that.
Whipped up a quick Suneido program this morning to send an
update notice to everyone who downloaded prior to last
night. Already had the SmtpClient we wrote to send the
download replies so it was pretty easy. Almost forget to
eliminate the duplicate emails, although there aren't too
many of those yet. Easy fix, though, just had to
add "project email" onto the query. Nice to be able to
make use of our own tools, or as one of our visitors put
it "eat your own dog food".
The forum seems to be getting a little more activity, which
is good. But I've had some feedback that people don't like
to use web based forums. Maybe a mailing list (or several)
with web access to archived messages would be better. Hey,
maybe we can write a Suneido program for that. :-)