supersonic feet

The entire bragster team is off to Austin, TX in early March for the South by Southwest Interactive festival. Should be fun!

The official Rails blog has the announcement that Rails 2.0 is done and great news that is too. Now I just need to find the time to eventually catch up on all the changes and start playing with it!

Brian Oberkirch has been on a bit of a blitz of great posts about social networking today (and I’m not just saying that because he picked up on bragster supporting hCard import yesterday).

The one that I really liked is from “simple to obvious”, in which Brian has a go at the propensity people have for assuming a ‘regular user’ exists and can/should be catered to. You should read the whole post for the detail, but the bit that got me at the end was this:

I think we’ve made a fetish of ’simple’ software… Simplicity is not a value in & of itself. It’s a condition of usability within a given context. Maybe we should start trying to make ‘obvious’ software instead. What’s obvious to someone may not be obvious to another.

This is a really good point. There’s a clear danger of just designing ’simple’ interfaces and interactions where what we really want is something that’s obvious to the user. It may be that a successfull task is not a ’simple’ thing to complete, but if it’s always obvious what you need to do next, success becomes more likely. As Steve Krug would say, “Don’t make me think!”

While you’re at Brian’s site, be sure to read “What PR people should know about social media”.

Having mentioned I wanted to implement proper hCard support on bragster.com, the opportunity arose much sooner than expected.

Having played with the mofo Ruby gem over a weekend, it became obvious we could implement not just hCards on our profiles (which is a very quick thing to do), but that we could follow Satisfaction’s lead in letting people import their hCard-supporting profiles when they sign up at bragster. So we did.

We just deployed the code to our live site this morning, so new users on bragster can now click the logo of the site they have a profile on already (places like flickr, twitter, last.fm), or the microformats logo to enter the full URL to any page that has their hCard on it, and it’ll pre-fill the sign-up form with as much data as we can use. Depending on the profile you’re importing and how much of it you filled out, it can pre-fill your username, first and last names, and which country you’re from.

This will hopefully be a first step and we can later add more features like subscribing to your hCard to get auto-updates to your profile; finding which of your friends are already on the site via XFN and more. Along with stuff like OAuth, hopefully we’ll be able to move away from asking for users’ passwords for other services (e.g. Gmail) just to help them move their data with them.

Yeah, so I just lost almost every file in my web root. I’m not quite sure whether it was me or a script I ran, but everything under the web root for this site (luckily bar the wp-content directory) got deleted.

I briefly toyed with taking the opportunity to switch the blog to Mephisto as I still had my database with a clean slate in terms of the site files, but I don’t actually have the time or energy to start configuring new stuff at the moment, so WordPress is back.

Even my minimal ’start of a live re-design’ styling is gone for now though, so it’s default WordPress theming for now. I did however, start on a ‘proper’ design for the site last night, inspired by a cool font I just bought for the logo/headings - Milk Script. So that might start to get implemented over the next week or so.

But for now: damnit with the no recent backups!

Tantek Çelik’s slides from his talk on Social Network Portability are a very good, quick read as an introduction to supporting social network portability on your own site/service using microformats.

The slides include real, practical demonstrations of how it can be done and having made a bit of a start (i.e. not a good-enough start) on making bragster profiles support hCard and XFN, it’s pushed me to get it sorted on bragster as soon as possible, both in terms of properly marking up the profiles as well as potentially doing some importing of hCard/XFN info.

A 2-minute play with mofo shows it’s not hard to do the importing bit, so (dev-time time allowing) I’ll be seeing how we can use it to good effect on bragster. Satisfaction’s signup form is a pretty good example of a first step in hCard importing - helping you fill out the signup form quicker by pulling some of the data you’ve already given to another social network.

Via Labnotes, we get to 99 bottles of beer in LOLCode. Awesome.

As I can’t waste my free time on my Xbox for the foreseeable future, I might as well catch up on some stuff I should’ve written about recently…

Goodbye Gottabet, hello bragster

A couple of weeks ago, we relaunched Gottabet as bragster. The result of five weeks’ development (pretty quick for re-branding a whole website!), the site has been re-focussed on the bragging/glory side of things. There were some new features added, a change in the navigation layout and some changes to stuff like browsing bets/dares and member profiles.

There’s still plenty more to come from bragster, with some pretty cool new stuff lined up before the end of the year and more to come in 2008. With the new feeds we added just before the re-launch and the changes to the navigation and layout in the re-launch itself, it’s hopefully now easier to get to the interesting stuff quickly.

A new addition to the team

I mentioned back in early August that we were hiring at Gottabet (now bragster).

Well, for pretty much the entirety of the Gotabet-bragster re-brand I was also reading CVs, conducting basic HTML/CSS tests and interviewing people to hire a new front-end developer. We set ourselves quite a high bar for hiring someone as we needed someone who could slip into the team pretty much seamlessly and get working on making our site more awesome.

As a result, the search took a while but in the end we had two great guys come along pretty much at the same time (the old ‘waiting for a bus’ thing) and I’m now pleased to welcome Andy Dust into our team. Andy only actually graduated this year, but has already hit a pretty high level with standards-based web design so we’re looking forward to his input at bragster. The first thing you’ll see from Andy is a new Flash-based widget for sharing your bragster bets/dares with others that he’s already been working on in this, his first week with us.

Tabasco shots, skating on a treadmill and sailing the Tyne in a dinghy

A few of my friends from back home in Newcastle have been getting into the bragster spirit recently with some mad dares…

A while back, there was a ‘tabasco challenge‘ on Gottabet, in which ChiefChimpanzee reckoned he could down 10 shots (25ml each!) of tabasco sauce in 10 minutes. He got oh-so-close at 9 shots. We then set up a challenge for our members, offering a prize if anyone could do the ten shots. Krishna came down to London one weekend and tried (even using the gorilla suit like ChiefChimp), but failed at 6 shots. Sent packing back to the North East, another of our friends, Neill took up the challenge.

He did it in 1 minute 10 seconds.

Check out the tabasco challenge page for the Video of Triumph.

On another visit to London, Krishna (bish) and I came to discussing whether it would be possible to get to level 10 (whatever that might mean) on a treadmill with a skateboard. We ran out of time to do it while he was still in London, but a visit home to his parents’ house and a quick use of his Dad’s treadmill later, the challenge was complete!

Follow the link and watch the video as, while he managed level 10, the whole ‘getting off the treadmill’ thing was a bit harder than bish had planned.

And finally, to the latest mad-cap adventure: Neill has declared that he’ll ’sail’ the Tyne river from Newburn to Tynemouth (where the Tyne enters the North Sea). In a rubber dinghy.

Backed up in his quest by Richy (warbastard on bragster), the pair will have to travel around 10 miles down-river watching out for, among other things, large sea ferries leaving Tynemouth for the likes of Amsterdam.

Rumour is they’ll be dressed like pirates for their voyage as well, so it should make for a good video no matter what.

My Xbox 360 has the Terminal Three Red Flashing Lights of Doom. I now get to wait at least three weeks for it to be repaired under warranty, potentially five.

Fun

Not quite but Derek Sivers, an early proponent of switching to Rails for large-scale websites, has written a post on his O’Reilly blog about why he just gave up on 2 years’ work in Rails on his CD Baby project to switch back to PHP.

It’s a very sensible article looking at the fact that Rails isn’t always the answer, much as it may pain us to admit, and that when PHP (or any other language) would actually be easier to use, we just should.

That said, I haven’t been tempted back to PHP for anything just yet