John and I, as lojoco, have launched a new website: Things To Do Today.
To be neat, we launched it on 1st January and I added it my projects page but forgot to blog about it over here. To steal the blurb from there though:
Updated daily, Monday to Friday, Things To Do Today is intended to be the lefty, crafty equivalent of all those “buy this gadget! look at this guy getting hit in the balls!” sites: every day, we feature four interesting things for people to do or make. These could be links to yummy recipes, fun things to make, excellent articles to read or beautiful videos to watch – or just ideas, tips or reminders for things you could or should do. If you ever need a bit of inspiration for tea or for your next craft project, you might well find the answer on Things To Do Today.
The site, like most of our sites, had been a long time coming but after months/years of procrastination, we decided to take a different tack with this one. We currently have at least five sites in development and close to completion. The “close to completion” bit is key: we’re busy perfectionists constantly indulging in feature creep so nothing ever gets finished.
With Things To Do Today, we decided to take the opposite approach – like back when Recycle This went from idea to online in just over 12 hours. I wanted to minimise John’s involvement as far as possible to avoid that bottleneck and had plans for a completely basic-to-basics site with no content management system or anything but in the end, he put in a few hours and created a micro-site with Ruby-framework Sinatra.
And a good job too, immediately after launch on New Year’s Day, we found ourselves adding an RSS feed – because it seemed insane to have a daily update site without one. And now I’d really like some sort of discussion forum because, while I’d conceived it as largely read-only, it seems weird not to have some commenting system (a site without comments, in 2009? how strange!). Hopefully that will follow in a few weeks.
I think it was a good exercise for us to swing back away from over-engineering sites but I suspect we went a little too far with the initial bare-boneness of Things To Do Today. Live and learn etc.
Hopefully the low-tech won’t harm the site in the long run though – it’s already be well received by Recycle This readers and it’s a really fun site to run – at the moment, it’s taking me a long time to create each day’s ‘To-Do’s but it’s fun research, looking up recipes, crafty patterns, watching cool videos… If you have any suggestions for things for me to include though, do holler – email: thingstodotoday@gmx.com :)
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