Week 1 at Suneido.com

After Thursday's peak, the downloads dropped off to about 10 a day over the weekend, probably because the announcements all fell off the news pages. Of course it was a long weekend as well, but programmers aren't supposed to take weekends off, are they? One good thing about the reduced traffic was that I had less distractions and I actually got a "Getting Started" guide finished. And finally, after 8pm on Monday night, I uploaded the new version to the website. Tried to do a good job of testing everything, but it's always a little scary releasing a new version. Especially at this stage, when people are downloading it for the first time, you want it to work!

I'm hoping that the "Getting Started" guide will help people to get over the initial hurdle of a new system. There's probably more I should add to it, but it's a start. It also made me clean up a few odds and ends in Suneido because it was easier to fix the program than to document the awkward behavior! Being forced to work through building a simple application also renewed my perspective on Suneido. It's hard to see the big picture when you're buried deep in the code. Overall, I think it's looking pretty good. Still lots of rough edges and a few potholes, but definitely getting there.

I remembered NewsForge (www.newsforge.com) and posted an announcement there, and also got news items onto Dr. Dobbs (www.ddj.com) and Software Development (www.sdmagazine.com) so the traffic has picked up a little - 28 downloads today as of 4pm. That brings us to 184 downloads in the first week. I'm happy with that.

Whipped up a quick Suneido program this morning to send an update notice to everyone who downloaded prior to last night. Already had the SmtpClient we wrote to send the download replies so it was pretty easy. Almost forget to eliminate the duplicate emails, although there aren't too many of those yet. Easy fix, though, just had to add "project email" onto the query. Nice to be able to make use of our own tools, or as one of our visitors put it "eat your own dog food".

The forum seems to be getting a little more activity, which is good. But I've had some feedback that people don't like to use web based forums. Maybe a mailing list (or several) with web access to archived messages would be better. Hey, maybe we can write a Suneido program for that. :-)