Blog.OnlinePrimary.us

Today I started codifying what the elements, flow and process of the OnlinePrimary site will be.  “Wireframing” is what some call this activity (by analogy to roughing-in the outlines of an under-construction physical object using stiff wire).  I need this for the visual design spec, but it will guide the implementation as well.  First up: thinking through what will appear on the site’s home page.

The tool I chose to do this work is on online drawing tool Gliffy.  (I might have used Microsoft’s Visio software, which I have, but I like to learn about the capabilities of new web-based tools by using them for real work.  I’m pretty impressed with Gliffy.) Gliffy’s tools let me sketch in the elements of the page, them move them around, resize them, and so-forth as the work evolves.  To avoid any suggestion that my drawing was a visual rather than structural design, I stuck with a pallette of black, white and grays and with simple rectangular shapes and plain type. 

 It was a short workday though.  The morning was taken up with a long-scheduled doctor’s appointment, extended by a trip to the (busy) lab for the usual tests, and then a revisit to the lab in late afternoon for a second test the doc ordered.  So today’s yak was a different sort, but I still spent a lot of time yak-shaving.

The one piece of this project I feel least qualified to do is the visual design.  I’ve spent enough time working with good designers over the years to get a feel for general principles, so if I have to I can come up with a reasonably “clean” design on my own.  But “clean” is a long way from “great” and I want the site to be visually appealing and look serious about what it’s doing.  Moreover, I expect that a good design will involve creating some artwork (a logo, an icon, visual cues for the various sections and functions, etc.) and I’m definitely inept in that department. 

So I plan to enlist a visual designer to do those pieces of the project.  But before I get to that point, I need to be able to communicate to the designer what the heck it is am asking them to design.  I plan to do this via the Web. Over at  http://www.onlineprimary.us/designspec I’ll be building a design specification (”spec”, or “brief” as some call it).  When it’s done, I’ll seek proposals from designers to create the design elements from that starting point.  Today I get started on that.

“Yak shaving” is tech-speak for unrelated, often annoying tasks that must be completed enroute to a primary goal, and that’s what most of my Day 1 turned out to be.

For quite a while I’ve had a web server at a commercial data center, which I’ve used for various personal projects and to host websites for friends.  I didn’t want to use it for OnlinePrimary though, because my hopes are that the site will get more activity than my solitary server could handle.  So I decided to sign up for GridService from MediaTemple in hopes it will provide some scalability insurance.  (As additional motivation, both my server and its backup were starting to show signs of age, and my lease at the data center was up for renewal.)  A lot of the day went to migrating all of the sites, email accounts, etc. from my old server to the new, and getting all the internet addresses changed over to the new server, and testing that everything still worked.

Then there was setup to do on the server for the onlineprimary.us domain and this blog.  (Though MediaTemple does make it mighty easy to get Wordpress set up.)  And doing my first blog post, of course.

Bottom line: Migrations successful, and infrastructure taken care of.  But no hands-on work on the thing that’s the reason for this party.

Oh yeah, and what am I supposed to do with all this yak hair?

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!