Carsonified

Wow, Day One is over and it was really exciting (and pretty hectic). Here are some interesting points:

* Mike has only come up with one logo idea, as we don’t have time to discuss several different ideas
* Keir and Elliott are using a Python class in Django that makes working with the Twitter API much easier
* We’re having to deal for the unreliability of the Twitter API by creating Cron Jobs that do some of the heavy lifting later. This way the app won’t hang on the user while it waits for Twitter to respond.
* We’re attempting to get some blog coverage by offering embargoed content which can be released right at launch.
* Mike is creating flat HTML pages and then Keir and Elliott are going to integrate them in Python templates
* We’re going to put a video on the home page to help explain what Matt does

So, on to some more videos we shot today.

In this first video, I have a conversation about the technical happenings on the Matt build (after we blab about some meaningless stuff - be patient my young grasshopper).

Matt Week - A chat with Elliott and Keir from Carsonified on Vimeo.

In the second video, the Carsonified Team gather on the bean bags to recap where we finished after Day One.

Matt Week - Day One Recap from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Jo (aka Joleeen) just finished interviewing the team about Matt and what’s going on this week.

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Matt week has officially begun at Carsonified HQ and it’s pretty insane around here already. We broke down the different jobs like this:

* Development: Keir and Elliott
* Design: Mike
* Blogging/photos/video: Ryan and Jo
* Copywriting: Louise
* Getting the word out: Tasha, Will and Dominic

Once we decided on the various roles and who was doing what, Keir gave a quick over of the app to make sure everyone understood the various details. Then, we did a quick brainstorm of the homepage content and how it might be layed out.

Here are a few logo ideas Mike has been messing around with …

Keir recently came up with a really fun web app idea … so the whole team is taking a week off to build it. It’s going to be called ‘Matt’ and it’ll be built in Django on a popular API, include a desktop AIR app, and will be hosted on an elastic computing cloud (probably Flexiscale, but yet to be determined).

Those of you who have been following us for awhile will remember that we did something similar recently called Idea Week where we built HugMyMac.com. It was a blast and we’ve decided to do something similar again.

We’ve never built anything in Django, AIR or used elastic computing, so it’ll be fun to learn. It’ll also be a difficult but fun challenge for Mike to come up with a complete visual identity, site, web app interface and desktop interface - all in four days. Yikes.

We’ll be starting on June 30th, so I hope you’ll tune in for the adventure. If anyone is stopping by Bath, come on over to Carsonified HQ to say hello.

P.S. Thanks for the photo Scott
P.P.S. Any affiliation with Matt Mullenweg, WordPress extraordinaire, is entirely coincidental :)