Web Development Blows
Freshman year of college Omer Bar-or and I had a great idea. Let's make an online website for selling and trading books and anything else for the Colorado College community. "It will be great!" Omer and I were just starting to learn about making dynamic sites (at least I was), and had a lot of fun putting it together. Mike even did some art work for us. Unfortunately, the year ended as we were getting to the point where we could release it. So, we said, "first thing next year!"
And sure enough, right when we were both back on campus we finished it up and put some flyers in Worner Center. Within a day or two we had 5 users! So, we started getting pumped for really pushing this thing. Then we got a call from CCCA, the CC Student Government. They had apparently spent a lot of money over the summer for someone to build a website for trading and selling books and anything else in the campus community and were getting ready to start advertising it. They were willing to push our blossoming club (eXtreme Reading) through some hoops if we took down the site. We laughed about it (what were the chances they would do the exact same thing!?), were disappointed, and stopped promoting our site.
Skip forward four years. OpenID is a emerging framework that is kind of confusing. Everyone keeps saying that we need a website explaining it. And like magic, Omer and I are back on the job. It was really our first web development project since freshman year. We are excited! We work hard! And we come up with OpenIDExplained.com. A website that both Omer and I are very proud of. We put on the finishing touches and start emailing people in the web development community for advice on the website and on promoting it. That was Saturday.
Two days later OpenID.net releases their newly redesigned website, aimed at novice users, trying to make OpenID less confusing. Not only do they do exactly what we were trying to do, they have fun little graphics. Graphics that I have only dreamed of making. They chose classy fonts.
We made our website to help OpenID. Now the question is, is there a place for ours? I am really disappointed. I really thought I was finally becoming a part of something that was bigger than me, bigger than us.
Well, shit. I hate web development.
9 October 2007 05:03am UTC • 537 views • 2 comments
Tagged with webdevelopment, openid, disappointment, college, whitetiger, omer
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2 comments
Peon Peetie
9 October 2007 01:09pm UTC
now, on to python!
Swabie Scabbie
11 October 2007 01:00am UTC
The front page of the new openid.net site is eerily similar to yours . . . but I think your explanation is still better in some ways, and your graphics are definitely better than theirs (you have all those awesome comics!). Plus, the new openid.net explanation may be better than their old one, but I think there's still always a need for multiple explanations of things.
When I was trying to learn about object oriented programming in php, I read a great explanation in an O'Reily book that helped me understand it, but I didn't really get how it worked until I read an explanation in another book (which Omer thought was a terrible explanation). Different explanations work for different people.