Hi there! During the last few weeks I’ve been working on a personal project to improve my regular expression skills. The project consisted on parsing a forum and generating an RSS feed. It sounds that simple, but from first revision to the current one (Rev: 73), there have been a lot of changes involved. I also put great emphasis on developing a great product using all my knowledge on marketing, user experience and presentations (and, of course, programming). I will tell you the complete story and how each decision was taken. There is room for some improvements, but by now, I consider most of the work done.
THE PERSONAL ITCH
For a long time, I wish I had some way to follow my school’s forum. It’s a hand-made one and it has not any support by its creators. I would like to be told every time there is some activity (a new message has been post, new replies, etc). There are some activities where time between publication and answer can be crucial for a deal (buy/sell forum). So I start building a RSS feed for each section of the forum I need.
POOR MAN’S RSS FEED
These days I am learning Perl and Regular Expressions, so I thought this could be a good project to improve my skills on pattern recognition and web 2.0 technologies. It didn’t take me to much to have something functional and useful. The first version just showed the title of the post and the number of answers it had and linked to the original page. This took me a few hours. However, it was still necessary to visit the forum to read the messages. My itch was not covered yet.
BRAINSTORMING
Sometimes, the best ideas are the ones you had after you are started working. Right just finishing my first functional version, I started having new ideas. I planned to add cool features which would extend the forum itself. As you can imagine, they all were great at their moment. Later, I cut off some of them.
The ones that have been implemented are:
- Adding author information.
- Adding publication date.
- Showing replies to messages in the RSS feed.
- Unwrapping text.
- Conversation mode (read complete thread).
- Creating links automatically for url.
- …
NEW VERSION
Once most of these new features were implemented, I started considering this project more like a product than a personal project.
MARKETING
These days, “beta” has become a de facto standard in every web application or service. My project was 90% ready so I decided to publish it before completion. I have used any free way to promote it: sharing posts in Google Reader, emailing to possible users, talking to my class mates about it and, of course, writing in the forum itself.
IMPROVEMENTS (STATISTICS)
After promoting it, it was time to get some feedback. Most of my users syndicate this feed with Google Reader. This is problematic since Google Reader is very slow to update your subscribers. So I added extra changes to measure how many user I have.
REDESIGN APPEARANCE
My numbers were not convincing me yet. I did almost everything I should to get users. Something was going wrong. And sure it was… the landing page was full of text and it was difficult to find the proper links to the RSS feeds. I redesigned this page as well as others of the service. I made completely straightforward to add the feeds. Now the number of suscribers increased.
DETAILS
Once 95% was done, it was time to work on the details. I work on making easier to read with a discussion thread, page navigation and improving the text (recognizing bullet lists for instance).
SECURITY
Finally, a friend of mine, Pedro Laguna, found some security problems which have been solved.
WHAT’S NEXT
I still have to make some retouch to the code base, but basically, my main focus is reaching more users right now. I have some ideas about how could I get more users, but I’ll talk about them once I have done them.
