I wanted a way to keep track of how much time I spent on the computer working on different things. To this end I began to use a program called Wakoopa. This is a cool program that tracks what programs your using and for what times. I really liked the program but it wasn’t playing well with a program I like even more called Digsby. Wakoopa kept crashing on me and it appears that the problem is with my laptop somewhere as no one else seems to have the same issues I do.

Not really wanting to take the time to troubleshoot I switched to another tracking program called Rescue Time. I like this program even better because instead of just reporting that I’m using “firefox”, it reports what web pages I’m actually visiting. When you spend as much time online as I do this is a huge added benefit.

All of this is just way to complain about how much time I lost this last week because my job got in the way of my site work. I went from being able to spend 14 hours on site development two weeks ago to only 4 hours last week. Fortunately it looks like I’ll be able to ramp up a bit more time this week which should put us into the final stages of development.

As the time to launch draws nearer my excitement is building. It’s about time to start collecting reviews so be on the look out for an announcement later this week.

After checking the analytics for my personal poker blog I discovered something I wasn’t expecting.  The visitors to my site are split fairly evenly between using Firefox and Internet Explorer as their web browser.  That’s a step in the right direction as Firefox should be the standard browser for everyone as far as I’m concerned.  The troubling information was that among those using Internet Explorer exactly half were using version 6 instead of version 7.

It’s possible to style a site for both Firefox and IE7 without too much difficulty.  I was really hoping I could get away with not styling for IE6 separately for Poker Tech Reviews.  Sadly that does not appear to be the case.  This means a little extra work I wasn’t counting on so everyone do me a favor and quit using IE6.  Ok, seriously go download Firefox and make every web developers job a whole lot easier.

I took a bit of a break from working on the main site yesterday and put up a new “coming soon” page over at Poker Tech Reviews.   The countdown page was really rather “blah” so I wanted to present a better face to the public.  Check it out and come back to let me know what you think.

With a design in place it’s time to start coding.  This is the stage I’ve been looking forward to the most and yet also had the most trepidation about.  I’ve decided to go ahead and use Wordpress for the full site.  It has much of the functionality we want built in already and with a few tweaks it should fit the bill.  My concern is that I’ll just about be done with the whole thing and then find some key functionality, I didn’t envision needing, being completely unsupported and having to start over on a different platform.

That’s really just a reflection of this whole process.  New ideas and challenges seem to be popping up and it all comes down to just sticking with the core principles and moving forward.  I’ve been reading a lot lately about how so many startups are crushed under their own weight as they keep adding features and never finishing a product worth launching.  I keep coming up with expansion ideas myself but I’ve decided to push them down onto a list of future features.  We will have some new features and functionality to add to the site after launch so it will continue to grow after take off.

For now it’s time to buckle down and spend some quality time buried in CSS, PHP, and XHTML.

Here are some choices for banners on the PTR site. Feedback would be appreciated.

(click on images for full size)

As a non artistic person I’m finding the process of site design to be a challenge.  The first draft of the landing page was completed on Saturday, then I summarily rejected it.  It was good for a first effort but it looked too web 1.0 and not enough web 2.0.

In other news I think we’ve nailed down our logo for Poker Tech Reviews.  That’s it there at the top of the post.  We have in red and black.  What do you think?

You may want to note the countdown clock at the right. That represents how many days there are until “The Launch”.

Tom worked very hard to make that. It looks great, Tom!

Judge Ito Sidebar: He might sell give you the code for that, if you are interested.

To simplify the process were going to look to news feeds to fill the bulk of news items for the site.  Their will be some original news items but they will be in the minority.  Links from this page will take the user to the originating site/article.  In essence this will serve as a news aggregator from various trusted sources.

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Here is the proposed skeleton layout for the Category Page.  When a user selects a category from the home page, they will be taken to a listing showing all the reviews within that category.

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Here is the first draft of the site’s Landing Page.  I’m pleased with it myself but we’ll see what kind of reaction I get.

Next up is the category layout page.  Fortunately this will be universal for all categories so I don’t need to have them nailed down 100% yet.

I’ve been spending some time learning more about Google Sites. Were using that for our intranet and I’m liking it so far.  It’s easy to add sites to serve as project pages and you certainly can’t beat the cost.

I’m also going to work on adding some sidebar content to this blog detailing what software were using so far in the development process.  Nothing out of the ordinary but I want to keep everyone updated on the process.

Let me know what you think of the layout.