BeatsBase: a case study

By chris, posted on May 25th 2007

I’m pleased to say that one of my clients’ websites was launched a few days ago. BeaTsbase, a community site for DJs has been in development since January, and it’s been a pleasure to do. Not just because Robbie has been a fantastic client, but because projectGenie greased the wheels of our communication.

Some quick stats. During the BeatsBase project 29 individual tasks were created, with a total of 721 notes added. That’s in excess of 85,000 words, or 340,000 characters! Phew, no wonder my keyboard is acting strange.

projectGenie hasn’t been our only method of communication. There have been a few dozen emails and about 10 phone calls, but it’s carried the weight for most of the project. In fact using it so intensely has helped me to see several areas it could be streamlined, as well as lots of ideas for new features.

Anyway, if you’re a DJ then you need to check out BeatsBase. And while you’re there say hi to Robbie.

Pressing words

By chris, posted on May 13th 2007

And as if the recent flurry of excitement on this website wasn’t enough, there’s a lot more changes happening. In essence, projectGenie.org is now running on the lovely Wordpress blogging system. Which means, as it’s now much easier for me to update the site, you’ll be hearing a lot more from me. Possibly.

Get the flags out

By chris, posted on May 1st 2007

What’s this? No entries for 5 months then two in a week? It must be something special! And it is special, in fact it’s a whole new feature.

Flag preview in projectGenie One of the things that I find difficult in projectGenie is keeping track of where I said I would do something. I have no problem seeing what the latest tasks are, and the latest notes attached to tasks, but I remeber I said I’d do something a few days ago, and I can’t remember where I said it or what task it was.

No longer! Now when I add my "Don’t worry, I’ll look at that in a couple of days"-type notes I can just tick the ‘Flag’ checkbox and that task is flagged for me. Not anyone else, just for me. You can see a demo of this wondrous thing in the little screenshot.

And when I’ve done whatever it was I said I’d do, or it turns out that the action is no longer needed, I can just un-flag it (de-flag, perhaps?) and the flag is gone. Simple!

The flags are set on a per-task and per-user basis, so that means that I can flag whatever tasks I want for me, and other users can flag other tasks just for them. If you want to get your hands on this feature then sorry, you’re going to have to wait for the official release of the Brookmeyer version.

Clocking in

By chris, posted on Apr 23rd 2007

Wow, it’s been nearly 5 months since I last wrote on here. What can I say, I’ve been busy. In fact I’ve been more than busy, I’ve been burning ever candle at every end I could find, but loving it (mostly!)

You may well be wondering what’s happening with projectGenie at the moment, and the answer is not much. I’ve added a few little updates to the demo site. In no particular order they are:

Not much, I know, but it’s something. For the ‘Brookmeyer’ version which hopefully I’ll get chance to work on some time this year, I’ll be rewriting the entire system to be much more modular, as well as incorporating my lovely JavaScript library to do all the eye candy stuff. I also want to give the option for clean URLs on servers that support it. And plenty more besides that, including reports, statistics etc. Goody goody. In the meantime please download ‘Anderson’, with the little tweaks mentioned above and watch this space.

To finish off I’ll share an excerpt from a nice email I got from a projectGenie user:

“First, major kudos for projectGenie! It is EXACTLY what I’ve been looking for to help me run my web design business.”

A spring clean

By chris, posted on Dec 2nd 2006

Yes, I know it’s nowhere near spring, but I wanted to have a bit of a shuffle round. SO I’ve redesigned the front page of projectGenie to be broken into 6 (5 if you’re a client) panes with a quick list of the recent changes to each data type in the system. That’s tasks, bugs, announcements, milestones, projects and (for the owner company only) memos.

Obviously that called for a bit of a change with the CSS files, and while I was doing that I noticed that the Pillarbox style was completely broken in Internet Explorer (surprise surprise). I’ve never really liked that style, it was only created because I thought I ought to have a red one, so I’ve scrapped it. That’s right - no more Pillarbox style.

Of course, if you want a red style then you’re more than welcome to hack your own.

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