I meant to post this on here, but posted it to my person blog on accident. So here it is in all its glory, complete with an addition at the very end.
Marco Arment asks “once it works, how likely are you to go back and make it elegant, fast, and secure?” On enjoysthin.gs the answer is simple: almost daily.
Enjoysthin.gs is developed very very iteratively. Being a side project, I have only so many hours a day to work on it. My philosophy is 1) write it, 2) test it, 3) launch it, 4) fix yesterday’s mess. For the most part, I only work on features that I can launch ‘tonight,’ if I can’t push it tonight, it’ll probably never go up. Sure, some things take a bit longer, but that’s my general rule.
As an example, the other day I launched the ability to upload and start serving ads without any pesky interference from me. When I launched it, there were almost no instructions, absolutely no analytics, no charming copy to get upsell you… it was just the basics.
Today I’m a bit further along with that. You can now view real-time stats (not as much as I’d like), you can read some stuff about how the ads work, and you can feel good knowing that this whole system has been tested out in the real world by actual paying customers.
What will tomorrow bring? Definitely something new, but also fixes for today.
Also, do the ads work? One ad was posted to enjoysthin.gs on Thursday morning, It’s been enjoyed both from enjoysthin.gs and the app site many times (and from several different URLs)… plus there writeup in gizmodo on Friday. Coincidence?
Also, I’d like to make a feature request to tumblr: allow us to change where we post each article to via the edit screen.
