Now that I have completed both LeagueSmart and OnlineListings I now have time for outside contracts. I am doing so through my new company GreenStem. If you have any work that you need done let me know and we can work something out.
The LeagueSmart release was a very gradual one, just the way I like it. To be honest notifying thousands of people all at once about a new application is a little of the stressful side. Many tests can been written trying to ensure the app is as close to bug free as possible, but having an application with zero bugs is only possible in dreamland. That is what is nice about releasing something gradually. Bugs are bound to show up once different people start using the application in a much different way then you anticipated, and they did just that for me. Luckily they were fairly small issues and were able to be fixed quickly.
The release of LeagueSmart took about a week. I gradually notified groups (~400) of current SoftballSmart users on a daily basis, which allowed for any errors that were discovered to be fixed before most people saw them. I found doing it this way greatly reduced the tension build up when you are tailing the log files and the hits begin to come in.
If you are in charge of managing a league of any kind please check out LeagueSmart, and any feedback is always appreciated.
I am happy to announce the launch of Onlinelistings. The purpose of the site is to allow realtors to create professional web pages that are easy to use for them and their clients.
This project was one that took a little longer than I initially estimated due to some factors outside my control and others that I never handled the way I should have. Below are a few tips to increase your chances of success, that I failed to remember while working on the project.
When working on even a small project the list of todos can begin to grow quickly and suddenly that small project becomes quite large. Features redefine the f-word ie. can really feature things up. What happens, is a good idea grows into something that seems to be required, which then results in the completion date being extended by a week or so. Add a couple more of these features and you have just added a month to the project. To prevent extended completion times determine what the core functionality is and work on nothing but that.
Without users even the best application is worthless. So get the core done, get it on the web then get people interested. Receive input from the users then make improvements to what has already been done. The benefits of this is that you get users that are interested, you get feedback from a different perspective than your own and you have a solid base to expand on.
There is always going to be the few, which includes you, that request the interesting features. Some of these suggestions may seem to make sense at first, but there is a good chance that the people that are requesting these features are the same people that purchase items like the vibrating knife to later discover that they don’t need it as much as they thought they would. Don’t be afraid to say no to certain requests. If interest continues to grow over time then it might be time to re-examine things.
Hopefully this reminder will help someone else from making the same mistakes that I did.
If you know any realtors that have a site that is hard on a person’s eyes I would appreciate it if you sent them my way.
1. This statement is backed by absolutely zero data
LeagueSmart is a web application that is designed to make creating league schedules and managing the stats as easy as pie. LeagueSmart is the upgrade of SoftballSmart, although the two will run in parallel for a while.
LeagueSmart is no longer created for just softball leagues, but will work for any recreational league. So far the application consists only of what is required for it to be useful, which is creating league schedules and keeping game scores. This may not sound like a lot, but anyone that has had to create a league schedule, will know that it can take a lot of effort to put together a schedule, and becomes a nightmare when a team backs out at last minute and the schedule has to be re-created. LeagueSmart automates the scheduling. To create the first schedule should not take a person any more than 10-15 minutes (depending on your team and game count), and recreating the schedule is even faster since you don’t have to re-add the teams, game locations etc.
Additional features will be added in the future, but right now I want to keep things as lean as possible to make sure that improving what currently exists is top on the priority list.
There are still a few more tests that I want to run before making it public, but I can say that things will be ready within a week.
I watched Scott’s great screencast on Git and figured I should make use of the old server that I have sitting around. Unfortunately, my install didn’t go as smoothly as Scott’s, mostly because the Ubuntu server edition has a few less libraries than the developer edition. So to make things a little smoother for others here are the libraries that I had to install.
sudo apt-get install build-essential tcl8.4 tk8.4 gettext1 # expat 2 wget http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/expat/expat-2.0.1.tar.gz 3 tar zxfv expat-2.0.1.tar.gz 4 cd expat-2.0.1 5 ./configure 6 make 7 make install
1 # curl 2 wget http://curl.linux-mirror.org/download/curl-7.18.0.tar.gz 3 tar zxfv curl-7.18.0.tar.gz 4 cd curl-7.18.0/ 5 ./configure 6 make prefix=/usr all 7 make prefix=/usr all install
1 # zlib 2 wget http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz 3 tar -xzvf zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz 4 cd zlib-1.2.3/ 5 ./configure 6 make 7 sudo make install
1 # openssl 2 wget http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-0.9.8c.tar.gz 3 tar -xzvf openssl-0.9.8c.tar.gz 4 cd openssl-0.9.8c/ 5 ./config --prefix=/usr/local/ssl-0.9.8c shared zlib-dynamic enable-camellia 6 make depend 7 make 8 sudo make install
Now you should be able to install git
1 # git 2 wget http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.4.4.tar.gz 3 tar -xzvf git-1.5.4.4.tar.gz 4 cd git-1.5.4.4/ 5 make MOZILLA_SHA1=1 prefix=/usr all 6 sudo make MOZILLA_SHA1=1 prefix=/usr install
The steps above may not be perfect as I posted them after retracing my steps after a successful install. My fingers are crossed.
Hopefully this saves someone a little time.
Thanks for the instructions. I found a typo. You are missing a dash on the openssl configure. Should be –prefix instead of -prefix.
Wordpress seems to remove the double dash out of the comment. Should be double dash in front of prefix.
Thanks – only thing that I had to change was a `sudo make install` for expat. (it’s seems FF has the desired OpenSSL version so I didn’t need to install that) Seriously, I’d say it was perfect! I really appreciate the install guidelines. Thanks Chris
hehe just realized you’re configuring open-ssl with zlib/etc – so I went ahead and did that. Sasha – I believe it’s a long-dash in the post, which is how wordpress (and other word processing apps) will infer double dash. It’s sort of annoying until you see it a few times.
Thanks again Chris!
Sorry about the double dash issue. I will look for a way around this for later posts.
Glad to see it has helped someone else out.
Thanks for this, worked great!
Thanks, installed it in Hardy Heron and everything works fine!
Thanks, these instructions really helped me lots!
Even if you compile git from source (to get the latest), it is still wise to install as many of those other libraries as possible using “apt-get install ___”. This is faster, easier, will get future upgrades to the libraries automatically, and will make them available to other packages that need them.
It’s also a good idea to use checkinstall for installing git from source. This creates a ubuntu-package (deb) which can be easily removed from your system.
Chris, thanks so much for the great post! Just a thought: you might want to update this post to include installing the git documentation. Thanks again!
If you want to include the manpages, you just need to do:
apt-get install asciidoc xmlto
then you can do:
make MOZILLA_SHA1=1 prefix=/usr all doc
sudo make MOZILLA_SHA1=1 prefix=/usr install install-doc
It’s a real help to have the manpages around – I’ve found
Works great, no problems, thanks very much for sharing this.
Thankyou chris . Your tutorial helped a lot.
Everything works, except when i attempt:
“tar zxfv expat-2.0.1.tar.gz”
it dosn’t recoginse it in GZIP format, although it clearly is, so it dosn’t allow me to continue.
Any help?
Following your instructions, managed to install git on AMD-64 / Ubuntu 7.10 / hardy
with newer git version
http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.1.tar.gz
Thanks!
Stephan
Jake Causier writes:
>“tar zxfv expat-2.0.1.tar.gz” it dosn’t recoginse…
Jake,
Try ‘man tar’ as a first pass.
tar(1) requires certain first arguments, x for extract being one of them. The z is not a valid first argument. Scroll up and look, Chris had it right, you mis-typed.
..Otto
otto writes:
> tar(1) requires certain first arguments, x for extract being one of them.
> The z is not a valid first argument.
otto,
Try actually running “tar” as a first pass.
tar(1) does not insist on any order whatsoever, x for extract included. The z is a perfectly valid first argument, last argument, or some argument in the middle. Heck, even moving the “f” amongst the rest of the arguments does not matter. Scroll up and look, Jake had it right, you mis-replied.
It’s more likely Jake had a corrupted download.
..scott, using tar (GNU tar) 1.19
Great thanks for the instructions! I wonder how you found all those deps!
Just installed git-1.6.3.1 on Ubuntu 8.10.
A little correction is needed for your tutorial, – must run “./configure” before making Git.
WORKED ON JAUNTY also.