stuff about autopendium

Though this blog has been kind of quiet the past few weeks, it’s not been for lack of action as far as Autopendium goes. Behind the scenes we’ve been testing a couple of new features, one small, one pretty big.

The first one is quite a minor thing, but one that’s been a major annoyance of mine for quite a while — there was no way of governing which photo was the main one (i.e. the biggest one) on the vehicle’s page. Well, now you can, and it’s simplicity itself to set it. Just go to the details page for the photo you want to set as the main photo (click on the photo then click on ‘See photo details’), and click on the icon next to “Make main photo for [your vehicle name]“. That’s it. You can even set main photo to be one of the photos from a running report entry.

The second feature is integration with Facebook. What does this mean? Well, for those of you with Facebook accounts (and that’s increasingly most of my friends here in the UK), your profile will show off all your vehicles on Autopendium and will update it every time you update them. It also means you can keep up-to-date with all your friends’ vehicles while you’re on Facebook. Finally, it will automatically update your mini-feed, and those of your friends when you add a new running report entry. And that includes showing the photos for that entry.

Keeping track of what’s happening with your friends old cars, and for them to see what’s happening with yours has suddenly got a whole lot easier.

Try it out. Just go to http://apps.facebook.com/autopendium now.

OK. That’s it’s. The site is no longer restricted to approved testers. A couple of days of tweaking, most to sort out Internet Explorer’s idiosyncrasies (don’t start me off), and come to some sort of compromise between how the various web browsers display things, and we’re done. Autopendium :: stuff about old cars is live.

Well, I say done. Honestly, there’s a bucketload of annoying little things, mostly to do with design that I’d like to tweak, but I don’t think any of them are going to significantly impact on the usability of the site, and a deadline’s a deadline.

The good thing is, unlike a magazine deadline (see When to launch), you can at least continue to tweak and improve things after you’ve gone to press, so to speak.

To begin with, I’m expecting things to be pretty quiet. I’m not planning on doing a lot of marketing (in fact pretty much none at all), just tell a few mates, and perhaps suggest they do the same. Somehow it doesn’t really seem in the old car spirit to be shouting about it.

And then hopefully a few at a time will find it useful, and then tell their mates. And so it goes. Perhaps.

I’m a perfectionist, and therefore never happy with the work I do.

For many years I worked in magazines, mostly monthlies, and there you’ve got two completely contradictory drivers. One, to do the best magazine possible; and two, to get the magazine out on deadline. You can’t do both, so you end up do neither, or choosing one.

Given the potentially dire consequences of a magazine missing its deadline (print and mailing slots, problems with advertisers and retailers, etc), you always go for the deadline.

Launching a new website is a little different, particularly if your not working for a big company which has its own internal deadline (this financial quarter, etc). When do you launch? When it’s ready. When is it ready? Well, for a perfectionist, never.

Never is not a good time to launch, so when do you go for it? For Autopendium, I’ve decided to pick two (fairly arbitrary) milestones. The first was usability/usefulness, and the second was an absence of (known) significant bugs. The second is easy (only a couple more to go), the first I judged thanks to a good friend of mine, Julian, who I got to do some usability testing.

Julian is not entirely a typical user (he knows far more about old cars than most other old car owners, and currently has about 11 of them). He also really doesn’t like using computers (though he uses one for work every day), and isn’t big on spending hours browsing the web. Oh, and prior to doing the testing I had told him a bit about Autopendium, and he wasn’t interested.

So I wasn’t expecting much from the testing, except that he would find lots of things he didn’t like, didn’t get, and didn’t want. Well, there were quite a few issues the testing brought up (nearly all now fixed), but the main thing that convinced me that I should launch now was how much he enjoyed using the site, to the extent that the testing took twice as long as expected.

So, is the site perfect? Nope! Are there lots of things I would like to improve, features to add? Damn right! Is it easy to use and useful? I think so, but please do let me know. Launch is set for this Friday (15th).