Daily update

Jon

I did make some progress today, but not as much as I would have liked. I didn't want to sequester myself into the basement all night, since I was at work all day and my son had tonight off of his job, so I broke out my old laptop and spent much of my time setting up my development environment on that so I could at least be in the room and interacting with my family while I worked on things.

This computer is 9 years old, and it was last used 9 months ago, so there was a lot to update and configure, but I did end up getting everything working! I made some progress to the code base, specifically with adding the ability to manage the roles on user accounts.

There were some distractions with helping my son set up a blog to use as a fund raiser for his upcoming class trip as well, but I think my tiredness got in the way more than anything. After a day of meetings and programming at work I was a bit brain fried when I got home.

Overall it felt like I was very busy today, but I don't have all that much to show for it...

Jon

Adding roles to users gave me a little more of a headache than I had hopped, but I got it done tonight!

Next up is to add all of the security measures that rely on the roles and that will finish up the 0.1 milestone!

Jon

With the implementation of the security authorization system tonight, I think that's pretty much all of the foundational pieces!

I did create 2 more Issues in the tracker to be completed during 0.1, but they shouldn't be much of a delay. We are on track to have 0.1 completed before this weekend starts!

It's really late and I have work tomorrow so I really should be in bed by now...

(If you don't know what 0.1 entails, then check out the Roadmap)

Jon

I almost finished the first milestone... But I had to depart for a SAR mission for a few hours and that prevented me from finishing the last little thing.

You know... I really hate trying to tweak css..... It never is as easy as it seems it should be.

Jon

I had to start over on the template. The previous one was too buggy to make work correctly so I'm starting from scratch. Hopefully this will not take too much longer and then I can move on to Milestone 2! That's where the fun stuff will begin!

As much as I'd like to stay up late tonight and knock this out, I really need sleep. There have been so many late nights this week, between working on this site and SAR missions.

Jon

Milestone 1 is COMPLETE!

Jon

The last two days have been really busy with working on the next milestone. Unfortunately there were several other features that I have to put in place first before I can start work on the next milestone. The first of these features I have already completed, and the second of the features I have already made a lot of progress on. If all goes well I should be able to finish Milestone 2 by Sunday, but there is a lot going on this week that may get in the way of that. I'll do my best to stay strong on this project though.

Jon

No code updates today, but I did get a new post published. My son had a band concert that took up most of the evening, plus my wife convinced me to start watching Rings of Power. It's actually not bad. I say as a non-hard-core Tolkien fan.

Code updates will resume tomorrow.

Jon

I got a lot done today, but it feels like there is so much to do still. I’m almost done with the final pieces of the Publishers feature, which allows you to register your publishing company to make managing your projects and teams easier.

If nothing gets in the way then tomorrow I should be able to start on adding Anthology Projects to the site. Obviously this is a critical piece of the application so I will need to take the time to make it easy to use.

Also I wish I could hire a web designer to make this site look amazing.

Jon

On the days where I have to work in-office it's so hard to feel like I have significant time to spend on the site.

Tonight I worked on finalizing the publishers page, made it mobile friendly, and fixed a few other things. I have one more piece to do for the publishers feature, and that's to create an admin panel to let the admins monitor what is being created and by who. This shouldn't be a long piece to do, but it is Wednesday evening and I haven't even started on the main feature for Milestone 2 yet... Which is kind of a large feature.

So I feel like I'm falling behind.

In other news, I got the email announcing sign ups for a convention in October. Do I want to try for a table? It's for authors, but I don't have many books of my own yet. I do have some plans to pull together all of my short stories into a personal anthology, but with me working on Anthology Gateway I doubt I'll get the time to finish that. I still have other anthologies to sell, though, but I don't know if that will be enough to get me a table. Each applicant is vetted and voted on by a panel at the convention, and they only have something like 20 tables if I recall correctly. Or I could just go and bring business cards and flyers and try to pitch Anthology Gateway to all of the authors there.

I wonder if they need anyone else for doing panels...

Jon

I did some thinking today on what premium services will be offered for projects or publishers that pay.
I know that money is a tough subject to discuss, but it's an important one. Running the servers for this site and the various tools and licenses costs hundreds of dollars a year, plus the time it takes to build this application.

There will of course be a free trial for the service, and then there will be a one time payment for each project that you want to host on Anthology Gateway. What I thought of tonight, what about adding more organizational tools for publishers that will be running multiple projects for a small subscription. I need to make sure that there are enough features for that to make it worth the upgrade, while still not making the single projects (not attached to the publisher subscription) feel like they are crippled.

The goal will be that paying for a standard anthology project should meet the needs of pretty much every project out there.

Anyway, on to code updates! I started working on the Anthology Projects feature today, which is encouraging! I don't know how much will be done this weekend, but I have a good plan created for it.
I will need some testers to help me out soon. I will need feedback on how everything works and looks, and if everything is easy to understand and the flows are logical.

Jon

The last few days have been really busy, with lots of detail work on one of the major features. We can now add an Anthology project and fill in most of the information. The information can't be displayed or used, yet, but it's a strong step in that direction.

The next step is to allow you to upload the book cover and a project header image. The complication is that this will need to be stored in file storage somewhere, and in a secure way.

I also still need to find a better way to display some of this information. I am not a UI / UX designer, so what I add is not the greatest experience, and takes a lot of my time to fix. I wish I could afford to hire one, but not yet. Maybe after we get a few customers on the project I'll be able to afford to pay someone to come in and improve the experience.

Jon

Today was spent mostly in research. I now have the knowledge and path forward to be able to upload images to an S3 bucket, the schema that I'm going to use to organize the uploads, and most of the nitty gritty details.

There are still some considerations to make, such as how to implement caching so that I'm not paying for all of the access traffic every time the image is viewed, but some of that will come later.

So not much code done tonight, but I have the path laid out for tomorrow.

Jon

I have been working slowly because of mental resistance to the task that was before me. It's difficult to work when you know that the next thing you have to do will take several hours to complete and you only have a little bit of time.

But it's the weekend! That means I have a lot more time available to work on the project, and I did it! In my dev version you can now upload images for your anthology project and they are stored in the cloud (AWS) and are secure. I'm also trying to make sure that I use as much caching as possible so that I minimize the time spent communicating with AWS to retrieve the images details.

I'm brain fried... time for ice cream and minecraft. 😃

I know that Milestone 2 is taking longer than planned, but I am making progress.

Jon

In the latest update you can now "launch" your anthology project!

This means that your anthology will be made public and can be searched for, favorited, and all the other stuff that you want to increase your exposure.

Of course all of that launched functionality still needs to be built... But we're getting there.

Jon

Today I made some more progress towards Milestone 2. This was not so much about creating any new features but focused on cleaning up some of the code behind the scenes that would allow for a nicer experience for users. Basically, now you can view the anthology projects even if you are not logged in with an account.

The next step will be to create a search page, to allow you to search for specific anthologies. Although... maybe that feature should be held off until we have enough projects in the system to warrant a search feature. For now I should just be able to create a single page that shows all launched anthologies.... hmmm, more to ponder on.

Thanks for joining me on this journey!

Jon

Ah, it's been crazy! I took a few days off to go on a vacation to see the Solar Eclipse (See my Instagram for pics) and just got back. It was a lot of fun, but now I need to get back into the swing of things around here.

Milestone 2 has taken way longer than I anticipated, but it should be ready to go this weekend. When I get that out I will reach out to some of my author friends and see if they can do a quick test for me of the workflow and see what feedback they give.

If it's all good, then we will officially launch in a capacity where publishers can sign up and add their own anthology projects that will be opening for submissions this summer.

Jon

I think I have the basics of the browse page figured out. I'm officially moving on to the next steps after tonight. We're getting close! 🙂

Jon

Milestone 2 has one major step left, to create a home page for the app. Of course this will be mostly blank at the moment, but it will be a start.

I really need to find some people to help test the User Experience next week. If you're interested, contact me! 🙂

Jon

I had such high hopes for last weekend, and then things did not go according to plan. I must have caught something in Texas because I was knocked out of commission from Saturday through today. I'm finally feeling better and eager to get back to coding! Let's see how much I can get done tonight.

Oh yeah, and Taxes were another distraction. Finally got those taken care of.....