One Week

More than a Barenaked Ladies song… it is the amount of time we just spent (this past week) fixing issues with PUBLIC CHALK and finishing up some of the initial functionality that we thought was “absolutely” necessary before we rolled any part of this out to even a small group of friends.

Here is a list of just a few things that we accomplished this past week:

• We tested and made some fixes to the invite functionality.



• We changed the register process to make it as streamlined as possible for new members.



• We drank 3 very nice bottles of wine. Note that this was done over an entire week by three of us, not all at once… although, at times, I think we could’ve all used our own bottle.



• We changed the look and feel of the application. Our initial color pallet was not working anymore – too much orange and pink and teal (no, I’m not joking, those really were the colors… and, no, our designer was not retarded).



• We incorporated the new name and logo.



• We worked on overall performance to make sure moving around the site is quick.



• We taught the dog how to jump into the pool. Before this week he would always walk down the steps. Now he throws himself in with abandon from any side of the pool.

• We updated copy throughout the site – including the copy on the initial crew – so that, hopefully, it makes sense to everyone who reads it as they learn about the site. In case you are curious, copy means the text on different parts of the site. I was just calling it, “The text on different parts of the site”, but I was told that I had to be more official and call it copy.

• We took a really cool “welcome” picture you will see in the “Getting Started with PUBLIC CHALK” crew. I know, it looks like it would be a 3 minute project – but it took us a good 15 minutes to get a picture we liked.

• And, we made a list… of a whole bunch of additional functions that we want to implement soon after rolling PUBLIC CHALK out. We realize that we’re going to have to fix some bugs – but we also want to make some really cool new features available soon after the initial release.
  

So, here we go… our first real “rollout”. We hope to hear some good things back from our initial users as well as reports on any issues and we’d love some suggestions on what you like best and what functionality you’d like to see in future releases.

ETJ

Oh Romeo!

On April 2, 2008, I wrote a blog called “What’s in a name?” I talked about how we had gone ahead and chosen the name “Theo” before actually owning it and how we had fallen in love with the name. But, like Romeo and Juliet the quest to consummate our perfect love ended tragically. A lesson was learned that I’ll share – don’t pick your name until you are sure you can actually own it one day. And don’t assume that:

1. Sedo.com is ever on your side (or that they have any type of good customer service or will actually do anything for you that you cannot do on your own) or
2. That a person listing a domain for sale actually plans on ever selling that name (rather they lead you along letting you think that at a certain price point they will be satisfied and when you actually meet that price they say no and go tell someone else that they were offered $xx or in our case $xx,xxx in the past for their domain name).

But, unlike Romeo and Juliet who had the misfortune of actually carrying out their suicide pact, we, as a group, decided not to put on the black sneakers and drink the green Kool Aid. Instead, we renamed ourselves to something that makes a bit more sense than Theo, that we kind of fell in love with, and, most importantly, that we could actually buy!

There was going to be a big unveiling of the new name right here in this paragraph, but I am assuming that you have probably already looked at the new logo and maybe you even got here from the link on the web site and maybe the URL from blogspot gave it away. So, I’ll just tell you a little bit about the name and the logo.

The name is kind of logical for us. Public Chalk’s mission is to provide a real-time multimedia utility that engages your groups of friends in conversation. Basically – pick up a piece of chalk, find a blackboard, invite the friends who will be most interested in what you have to say, invite them to watch you write, let them write back.

The logo was designed by kick-ass San Francisco based Stan Zienka. You can see that the lettering is simple and upper case – just like you find on most chalk boards and the background is deep gray, not accidentally also just like a chalk board.

So, we have a name. Oh, and, while we were trying to figure out the name a lot has happened on the development side of the house. We expect to deliver release 1.0 in early August. Check back soon for the initial feature set and planned development beyond the initial release.

ETJ