Bang!
That’s the sound of the starting gun going off for my month-long marathon to launch the OnlinePrimary.us website and experiment on Independence Day 2007.
Welcome! My name is Jim Edlin and I’m the instigator of this craziness. I’ll have more to say later - on the site itself - about the reasons and ideas behind the Online Primary experiment. For now, this is going to be a journal about the process and progress of creating the site.
Since the Online Primary site isn’t public yet, and at this point only a few folks even know this blog exists, I’m mainly writing now to create a record of how OnlinePrimary.us came into being. Today is the “official” start of the process - meaning today I started a leave of absence from my “day job” to devote full time to the project for a month.
There’s been some activity already, obviously. About a month-and-a-half ago (April, 2007) I hatched the initial idea and decided to pursue it. A few days after that I acquired the onlineprimary.us domain (and onlineelection.us, for a possible extension of the experiment). I signed up for GridServer service from Media Temple to host the site. And I’ve been noodling out details of the site’s functionality and design in my head pretty much every spare waking moment since then.
Now comes the cold water of reality — getting it out of my head and into code and pixels. So wish me luck.
I’m on my mark.
I’m set.
Bang!