It feels like it’s been forever since I last posted. First off, I set up a Basecamp project for me and the other two programmers, which is helping with keeping track of milestones and to-do items. I’m liking it a lot. :)

We’ve also moved the new URL (which we’ll disclose in a week or two when we’re ready for beta testers) to a set of dedicated servers. Which also means that we can use Subversion on them (and we are), rather than on Sourceforge’s servers. I hadn’t used SVN on Mac/Unix before this, but it’s easy and all is going smoothly.

Finally, as far as the actual coding goes, I’ve got most of the user authentication stuff working. (It was a stupid error. :)) I’ve set some ambitious deadlines for each stage of the project — and when we get a little bit further along and I have a more accurate assessment, I’ll make some of those known, particularly the launch deadline — and even so, I’m almost positive we can make it happen.

One last thing: since this is going to be a subscription-based membership (well, most everything will be free, but there’ll be a higher-level pay-per-month membership that’ll help us have the money to deal with growth when/if that happens), I’m not sure yet if the code will be open source. I want to open source it all, but my business sense tells me that’s probably not a good idea. My guess is that we’ll extract parts of the code and open source them. We’ll see. Whatever ends up happening, rest assured that “Don’t Be Evil” is my motto and that I’ll do my best to make it open and as free as possible. I’m not in this for the money. In fact, there was a brief moment when I thought about how rich I could get (assuming this whole thing flies), but it almost instantly sucked out all the energy I had towards working on the project, stopping me dead in my tracks. I can’t do this for money. That’s not how I work. Which is good. :)

Technorati Tags: Beyond, genealogy, Basecamp, Subversion

Posted in Development
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