Postmortem For Idea Chimp

The concept Idea Chimp is not new. You create lists of words, select ways to combine the lists together and then lets the computer pick words at random to make a sentence. Sometimes these ideas are funny or odd but often they can give you the gem of an idea the you can use. Because the word selection is random you often get combinations you would not expect.

People used to do this with paper and dice, Idea Chimp make the whole process easy for you by providing and easy way to manage lists and generate new sentences.

The Tech.
Regular readers of this blog will know that  I am really just starting out on my journey making web applications. Idea Chimp is my first attempt at letting people log-in to a system then create and use data. It is all powered by the google appengine and it turns out much of this stuff is pretty simple. It was just unknown to me.

The server side python code is not the greatest code ever produced as it represents the learning curve I went through on this stuff.

I subscribe to the idea of pushing as much as possible to client side, this kept the server side quite simple, it basically stored/retrieved the data. My JavaScript improved over the course of creating this app. I have also written enough JavaScript to realise I don't enjoy writing it that much. I love JQuery but Javascript has become a take it or leave it language. Perhaps it is a lack of experience in it, as in am I missing something or perhaps I got fed up with typing function all the time, why they did not call abbreviate it to fn as it is such an integral part of the language :)

Overall I was happy with coding and technical aspects of the project. If I had to pick a weakness in the development process then it would be my lack of style. The sites I create lack a level of polish. I need to be aware of this as I do my next projects.

Release and after.
The tech and development phase are my safe zone. Marketing and post release are the opposite. This time made a bit of an effort. Here is the list

• Chrome Market place
• Twitter
• Side bar promotion on my blogs

It was my first go at using Twitter and hash tags to promote anything. I did not want to spam places so was selective in what I did.

I also came to the realisation that many of my visitors come to this site and my other blog and only read one page. It makes sense to try and get them to try out my web apps so I added them to my side bar.

The effect of all this was approximately zero :) But at least I did it and learned next time round I need to work on this even more.

Conclusions
Again I enjoyed making this little app and learned a lot from it. I am becoming more comfortable attempting to promote/market my creations. I think that is an important thing as once I am comfortable doing this sort of thing I likely to do more of it and improve at it.

I am guilty of not having recorded my hours on this project very accurately at all. I suspect it hit the 50hr mark but am not sure. Ooops.

Number of users is pretty low and I admit to being a little disappointed with that. While Idea Shark is not earth shattering in its originality it is fairly useful to certain groups of people. I am not going to publish stats on visitors just yet. You will be able to find them in next months visitor report.