Going Beta

Well Auditioners.Com is going live this week with some users from a further education college - our target early adopters.

Notice that the theme is different to that we originally envisaged -this is because we had a bunch of red herrings and wild geese running around on our servers and to eliminate suspects we switched to the standard Liferay theme. In the end its clear that our chose theme (Spurt, I think) was not the culprit but we quite like the simplicity of this whitened (see CSS) version of the standard one and kept it. Spurt is also a non-standard one so its one less thing to worry about, and Lord knows we have enough to worry about without that.

After signing up and logging in the users get to see the "Main Stage" and the odd instruction about what the site does and how to use it.

For the record: Google Analytics has been quite brutal in its results such that it's clear that aside from something from Brazil that alighted on the site for 0 seconds and me (in Paris, France) the only people to visit the site are those of us working on it. I'm sure that as the next few weeks go by I should be able to report on a few dozen more users around the midlands!

A Bit More Progress

A few more things have been done now:

• We are now Auditioners.COM
• Default themes and template for new users ( you can join up for free and check this out)
• Audition Pieces portlet is done with search functionality that enables users for find pieces
• Can export the selected Audition Piece to PDF

Also, we now have a proper Dev server (from Dell) although not yet commissioned

Our sights are now set on a go-live for some pilot users in August/September - when we've done a bit of tidying up and finished one more important bit of functionality.

Social Auditioners

After several more weeks of faffing about we now have the Social side of Liferay working so that our users can request friendships and once "friended" they can post on walls, get updates on activities, etc. We also have an Amazon bookshop, Google Adsense, YouTube integration and a conceptual model of the main default communities. Also, email notifications for new users and password resets, etc. and Chat are working nicely. We now have to play around with site and ensure that the default behaviour is appropriate and, sadly, begin to find the limitations of out-of-the-box Liferay portlets.

Aside from that, we've been busy updating an "Audition Pieces" database and a database of specialist Drama Schools in the UK along with the audition fees, main requirements, etc.

Oh, and the auditioners.co.uk and the auditioners.com are both now registered with our ISP and pointing to our server; and we have the router routing to dev and production boxes based on port numbers.

We have our own "FavIcon" too, thanks to the advice on the Liferay forum about this. And it does look much nicer.

Up and walking

..or crawling at any rate. Well, we now have a site that "exists" and rapidly approaching an Alpha version. It is, however, nothing related to medicine. As I mentioned in a previous post, I felt that life is too short to struggle to develop highly complex data structures and design extremely user-friendly UIs in our spare time - we needed something that would attract a higher number of loyal users for a proportionately smaller amount of development effort. The solution was to steal my wife's idea of creating a social network site specialising in services for the Performing Arts; she is a drama specialist and is aware of number of applications that might attract the interest of teachers, students and professionals in that market. So now we will soon be in business as "auditioners.com, the performers network". Actually, this is still www.auditioners.net - the .com address is not set up yet.

We have a dedicated test server on which the site is hosted and even a dedicated development server which is currently hosted at www.auditioners.net:5150 Both these sites are likely to go down at random moments as we are not yet ready for real users.

Getting this far has been a struggle and we've had to learn a little more than we wanted to about Routers and Virtual Networks, etc. but we are live at last with Ubuntu 64bit server v10.4, MySQL, Glassfish and Liferay.

This latest version of Liferay (6.0x) is excellent, the "control panel" is a great innovation and the new social tools such the Wall and an updated Chat utility bring Facebook-like functionality quite easily into Liferay world. There's an annoying bug with the Blog and Message Board that requires an awkward work-around unfortunately but we got the workaround working so its "invisible" now.

Our next steps are to confirm our themes, community pages and default behaviour and then start to add our unique applications. Still a long way to go but it already looks like a proper site.

Attacking in a different direction

I've always thought that Medys / Mediblog could be a huge "distruptive" factor in the social/health spheres but one barrier to success is the scale of the task ahead of us when compared to the time we have available to do it. Even if we have the whole site functionally complete there will be a long lead time to build up the user base and for the world to understand it. So whilst struggling with that disincentive, and after watching The Social Network, about the people & events around the creation of Facebook I remembered another idea that was kicking around last year. After more thought, and chats with Steve in a memorably dangerous-looking pub in Erdington, we're adopting a new strategy - creating a different kind of site altogether but one which seems more likely to attract some active users. I can't see this one changing the world but its more likely to get of the ground. In the process we'll learn more about the toolset we're using and how to deal with active users on the site, etc and will apply lessons to Medys as we go along.

So: the server farm (shelf in my garage) is ready, BT installing the phone lines today, ordering Business Broadband as soon as the phone line is active today and within a couple of weeks "Hello world" should be readily available from our joint Dev & Production system and the content should be ready for first set of pilot users by March 2011 and full "beta" launch in July. Can't say much about the new concept but will of course add the link here when there's something to see.

And it's still Liferay, Glassfish, MySQL, Ubuntu, MyEclipseIDE... with the new addition of the Liferay IDE.

Plus Ca Change

Well its more than 12 months since the last posting here which sort of illustrates the glacial pace of events. Essentially not a great deal has happened but despite that it has been necessary for me to tidy up the garage like an expectant father decorating a bedroom, only the new baby is a new server and it will be here in a couple of weeks. Just after BT and get the connections and fixed IP addresses sorted out. Some business stuff and re-organisation has happened too, now after a convoluted process its just me and Steve and a brand new bank account. Apparently the server makes quite a lot of noise, though it doesn't often need its nappy changing - which is good to know.

We are still administering the server with Rimu for the EuroHistioNet project (see http://www.histio.eu ) as that site is a testing ground for the social network side of the project (we can't afford the full stuff with our CMS provider).

Update

Well, not a great deal to report. As usual, all busy. Too busy to do stuff. We decided that we are probably wasting the money on the hosting as the applications are taking too long to come through. In parallel to that we've thought about hosting the development site at home instead and I've been doing some investigation into linux. I bought a 64-bit PC running Ubuntu Linux, to start to get a feel for how that is set up, creating a Linux server at home might appear very Geeky but the other reason for trying it was that it happened to be a bargain in PCWorld - no one wanted to buy it so the whole thing was available for a bargain £200 - 3 Gb RAM, AMD Athlon 64, monitor, mouse, keyboard, the lot. Of course the shop had no clue what to do with it either so the first task on getting it home was to figure out how to get the admin user to work. It turned out that there was a bug in the OS with which the PC was delivered: 32-bit Ubuntu Desktop 8.04, Hardy Heron that prevented me performing admin functions until the system hooked up to the internet and downloaded the latest fixes. So after a couple of days of downloading software updates it all worked perfectly and I've managed to get the Glassfish AS working. Next step is Liferay and MyEclipse, and then re-install the whole thing on 64bit Ubuntu Server 9.04 on a LAN here at home.

Or I could watch TV or play some music (which might be a little less sad for a man of my age).