Another week, another chance to reflect on where it went.

The big news of the week was the launch of the Ninja Tune XX website mentioned below. I’m still very pleased with how much we got done with such a short lead time. With quite a bit of attention coming to the site via twitter, facebook and a variety of music blogs (including pitchfork), I’ve been keeping a close eye on traffic and resource consumption. We had an early memory spike, which seems to have been resolved by removing the dependency on the RedCloth gem (I didn’t trace any specific problem to the gem, I just realised we didn’t need it any more and was pleased by the result), and a slight issue due to a mis-match between the versions of mongoid and bson_ext we were using, but those were easy fixes and the site continues to move along nicely.

Other than that, I spent quite a bit of time doing something I’ve not done for many years: watching a virus scanner work its way through my system. I’m working with a client who are hosting their apps internally and so need VPN access to update them, but the sysadmin wouldn’t grant that until I performed that scan. Naturally everything went smoothly other than that my computer was painfully slow for six hours!

There was a very helpful day with Ben and James working through next steps for the James Lind Library. We desparately needed to step back and take a long view at the site’s content, and were finally in a position to do that. After some drawing on the whiteboard, and some more in OmniGraffle we’ve got some ideas that I’m really looking forward to presenting to the client and moving on to implement. The more time I spend working on the backend for the site and immersed in the data, the more I want to get our stamp on it and open it up so that some of the wonderful old (really old) content can come to the fore.

We’ve entered another of those periods where there are lots of small projects to juggle, and lots of prospects, but nothing quite solidifying it. There’s some consideration of how best to land some longer term projects that might provide a little more stability as there are a couple of products that I’d really like to complete but it’s providing very hard to schedule them around lots of moving pieces. And I’m finally getting round to talking to solicitors about some sample contracts, a task I’ve been putting off for far too long…