Introducing Harmonious Fridays
On my second day working with Steve at Ordered List, we began our first application. I started programming and Steve started designing and a few days later we had a great start.
Only problem is that start has barely been touched during July and August. Harmonious Fridays will be our solution to that problem. Allow me to explain.
What
So what are we building? If there was a realm that Steve and I would not be bashful declaring ourselves experts in, it would be website administration. We’ve built countless systems that empower non-technical users to update their content, without giving up the control that developers and designers require. Harmony will be it’s name and managing websites will be it’s game.
Why
Both of us have spent our formidable years as web developers creating applications to manage websites. In fact, we got so tired of building them at Notre Dame, we decided to create one to rule them all. It was aptly named Conductor (built with Rails) and it was, and still is for that matter, awesome. We’ve been looking around at the various solutions (Expression Engine, Wordpress, Mephisto, etc.) and have not found one that hits our sweet spot.
Our Dream
We have a dream. We would like to manage all of our sites in one place. We want to login once and seamlessly switched between those sites. We are tired of installing software and setting up servers for each site that we create. We want full control (markup, styles, flexibility). We want an interface that is so simple our mothers could use it. We want statistics integrated in a way that will help us make content decisions. What about you? Do you have some of these dreams?
The Plan
In an effort to bring our dreams into fruition, we have declared Fridays as Harmony workdays (thus Harmonious Fridays). Each Friday, Steve and I will head into the office (wherever the office is that day) and work solely on Harmony. That alone should help us gain momentum on the project, but that is not where it stops.
We are building this first because we want it, but second because we think others will want it too (thus the survey). That is why each Friday (or sometime over the weekend), we are going to post the results of the day’s work. The posts will vary in content (concepts, code, mockups, screencasts), but, ultimately, will give you a chance to help guide the project and keep us accountable. We are pretty excited to try this out and curious to see what kind of feedback we get along the way.