This afternoon, I typed in 'www.popfly.com' in my browser and closed my eyes and prayed. When I opened them and found that the page looked the way it was supposed to do, I shouted out loud and danced through the corridors (which I don't do at all due to my very limited dancing skills :-) ).

The occasion? We had just pushed out new bits to production and my code was live and out there. And it was running the way it supposed to. There's no high which comes close to this. :-) It was quite an exciting afternoon - we had a ton of emails fly back and forth as we tried out the new production site, touched and probed the various parts of Popfly to make sure everything works.

There are a ton of new and exciting features - you can find the entire list at our team blog. I'll try to expand on some of my favorites.

Aaron Brethorst did a great job with simplifying the navigation. We had different navigation schemes in different parts of the site - we now have one unified navigation bar.

We also put out some major, much-needed features related to projects. You can now add and see comments, tags and publish links to Facebook. Here's a link which our big boss just published to his Facebook profile.

Unlike the last deployment, I actually wrote some code this time <grin/>. I spent most of my time on the new home page. Until now, we just had a static page when you entered the site which had a couple of links. If you wanted to go back to the half-finished mashup you were working the previous night, you had to poke around through the list of projects. We wanted to change all that - so we put in a super-easy 'recent projects' list so that you are just one click away from your masterpiece.

The other big thing which you will see on your home page on the left side is a combination of news items from the team blog as well as info on what your friends are upto (are they sharing new projects? Are they making new friends? ). This was a whole lot of fun to code up as designing for such a large number of users is quite challenging. We frequently had design discussions where the conversation would go like this

" I think we should implement it using this technique"
"That would not hold up well once we have X users on the site...at the same time"
"Dammit!" (and go back to the drawing board)

Here's a screen shot of how it looks (with fake entries of course)

And if you're wondering what's the dog is doing at the top, well, we've played around with our logo a bit this time and tried to 'mash' things up. The evil purple duck is still present all through the site but you'll see variations of the Popfly logo at some places. Like 'Attention Dog' above. Yes, that's really what we call him. Yes, we're a bunch of nerds :-)

Have fun with the site, y'all. If you experience issues (happens sometimes when we deploy shiny new bits), leave a message on the forums or post a comment or send me an email.

# Thursday, July 19, 2007 8:01 PM