During my travails around the interwebs, I came across an interesting Digg article. It turns out someone managed to get a website up and online, from scratch, in 24 hours. The 24 hours were spread out over 4 days, but it was still an impressive feat to go from mock-up to development to production in such a short amount of time.

To get the site up and running as quickly as he did, he relied on Ruby on Rails for the site's framework, as well as some free SVN to keep track of changes to the site files (a technique I plan on looking into implementing in the next day or two).

Graphically, the site isn't too complicated, but he admitted himself he's not much of a CSS buff; he basically took a template he designed in Photoshop and sliced it up into easy-to-manage template images. It's an admirable approach, but I know I can do better since I'm quite good at CSS!

I also have to give props to the guy for developing a fairly robust API within the 24-hour time slot. It appears to be fairly painless to use and offers a degree of interactivity that you wouldn't expect from a quickly-launched website.

Needless to say, Dominiek's endeavor got me thinking. I've been sitting on a novel website idea for the last four months or so, and I've decided that it's time I brushed the dust off and resumed work. I have a lot of ground to cover if I plan on launching any time soon, but I think if I tackle it in small chunks, it'll all come together relatively quickly. I'll start to reveal details of my mystery project as they're fleshed out, so stay tuned!

And I need more readers! Perhaps when I get my new project off the ground I'll develop some readers. I've only had a few "tech-related" postings, and I've done squat for SEO or marketing, so I can understand why my blog has basically tanked. I suppose there's always a chance my new project will take off and I'll gain a loyal following, but I'm sure that's something time will have to determine!

Until next time, folks!