Wordly project

Hard at work

Daniel Gr — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 09:22:37 +0000

Lookie, lookie! Here’s my new SearchPet!
I think I’m gonna name him “Birdie Nam Nam”! I loves my Birdie!

Anyway. Now I’m gonna eat some, and then continue working at implementing new and old Blogger templates. Hopefully, I can finish that today, and start on Movable Type or WordPress templates tomorrow already.

Good times.

Today

Daniel Gr — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 09:13:57 +0000

Today I start designing (coding and interfacing) seriously on Wordly again. And we should have – at least – a preview release out this month. Happy April, folks!

Dealing with Globality

Daniel Gr — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 17:33:49 +0000

One of the challenges one face when writing internet software is globality:

There are many languages in the world.
There are many countries with different timezones and DST variants.
There’s even several calendars in the world.

And that’s what I’m facing right now.

So. How to deal with it? You tell me. But I’m guessing some sort of cross-user customization / shared localization profiles will work best and be easiest to implement, so I’m probably going for that. Or?

Getting back on track..

Daniel Gr — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 10:29:10 +0000

I mentally started jaspoid (my company) on Christmas Eve 2006 – as a gift to myself – with the simple idea of playing around a bit in the web standards and blog publishing world. Less than a month later I seriously started working on Wordly to become jaspoid’s first product – a really efficient weblog platform, both cost and code wise.

About 2 months ago, when jaspoid became a proper company (with tax and business registration, and all), I’d kind of hit a wall. Wordly was basically done – but – it was nothing new under the sun. As much as I love simplicity, it was just good old Blogger with slimcoded web standards. Not good enough.

I did another, slicker version in February, but it turned out the same. War of the clones. And not good enough.

Today, I’m officially starting working on “try three”, and I’ve added 3 major design features to make sure it stands out:

Templating. Wordly will support all major template languages: Movable Type, WordPress, old and new Blogger, included.
Mobility. Making it able to import blogs from other platforms makes sense when trying to grab a market share, but portability the other way should also be important. Thus, Wordly commits to export to any blog platform, at a user’s request, and within 7 days.
Visuality. Editing like it should be: directly in the blog, looking exactly like it ends up published. No matter if it’s restyling the blog, rearranging a sidebar, adding a blogroll link, or a new entry. Right there, simple as it can be.

And to celebrate being back on track, Wordly is now offering WordPress blogs with 2 gigabytes storage, 6 gigabytes monthly traffic, and a free .org or .com domain, at an ~~almost~~ insane price of $9 first year, at least this and next week. (Usually $24/year.)

Pixly

Daniel Gr — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 17:29:58 +0000

I’m not much of a visual designer I believe, but Pixly needed a logo, so here’s how I designed one in 15 minutes:

Pick a font. (Picked “vanilla” Twentieth Century MT.)
Pick text color and background color. (Choosed to go with bright gray on dark gray.)
Tweak the font a bit. (Rounded off the p, and redid the dot over the i.)
Done!

Yes, I’m lazy! (Lazy, but efficient!) Here’s the result, anyway:

This is a project log, or is it?

Daniel Gr — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 18:38:02 +0000

Still, there’s nothing quite like black and white portraits and I’m having a day off, so – some I’ve enjoyed the last few days:

There’s just $100 in my bank account..

Daniel Gr — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:01:23 +0000

But having Tim McGraw singing “Live Like You Were Dying” on the radio playing out loud, while I type away dreamy code in my “home office” (which is really my bedroom), makes it all worth living.

Shania Twain’s “You’re Still The One” is up now, and I feel like dancing. See you!

Moonwalk

Daniel Gr — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 13:08:07 +0000

1 month until Wordly launches, 2 months until my birthday, 3 months until I’m (probably) broke.. Can I catch the moon?

~~Anyway, I’m writing a rather ambitious feature list right now that I’ll post at wordly.org soon (in 48 hours, or so). Wish me luck!~~

Update: Let’s just say I’m trying to implement a wide coverage of import/export blog possibilities, and several major templating systems.

That is, Wordly will probably support (new and old) Blogger templates + WordPress templates + Movable Type templates, et cetera. And thereto be able to import from (and export to) Vox, TypePad, WordPress, LiveJournal, MySpace, Blogger, and so on.

Ambitious, yes – but cool, I think – so, wish me luck!

Ouch!

Daniel Gr — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 11:33:28 +0000

Burnt a finger pretty bad on the oven, so now I can barely type. And it hurts!!

“On vacation.”

Daniel Gr — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 15:21:08 +0000

Wordly is having a small break while I sort out some paper work (taxes, accounting, and stuff), and recover from a minor fatigue.

Right now it looks like we’ll really be launching in a month, though I’m not gonna be stupid enough to make any promise – especially since the February 14 launch schedule totally blew away. But this is good news, I think. Work is going good, and I’m sure we’ll have something available before May.

Take care, people. “10-4, gone.”