stuff about autopendium

Quick note to apologize for the slight flakiness of the site over the past week or so. A few intermittent errors started to occur, which I temporarily sorted, but only temporarily, and what was really needed was a few hours with a clear head concentrating on nothing else.

Unfortunately this coincided with a house move, which left me short of time, head-space and, for a couple of days, connection to the internet. So, apologies, and hope it hasn’t inconvenienced you too much. (For any geeks out there I’ll try to post some details about the reasons over at out technical blog, pushrod.wordpress.com.

Cheers,

Chris

It’s been a week or so since Autopendium was opened to the world, and gradually it’s starting to attract some traffic, despite the minimal marketing.

The reaction has been very good, both from those I’ve pointed in the direction of it, and a few unprompted reviews (see here and here and here), and Google has been merrily indexing the site (finding a few minor bugs along the way), and sending people in its direction.

So, where are we up to with it. Pretty Good, I’d say (as in Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery and Pretty Good Privacy).

Not perfect (a word that’s been used way too much with the admittedly innovative iPhone, even by normally sober commentators). Not revolutionary. And certainly not ultimate, that overused, under-deserved, devalued word that these days means almost nothing.

This is what I think when I see people or companies use ultimate to describe their products.

1. Marketing bollocks, written by people who will say anything to hook you in. Therefore anything else the company says should be treated with suspicion (Even the UK Guardian newspaper has caught this bug recently, with one ‘ultimate’ guide after another).
2. Poor Quality Control. If the people putting together the product really think it’s the ultimate, then they’ve got pretty low standards. Don’t look to them for new features, improvements or bugfixes — they’re too busy congratulating themselves on their ‘ultimate’ product.

So, in the past week and a half, I’ve made nearly 50 improvements, bugfixes, and tweaks to improve the site, and I’m not finished yet. Each one makes Autopendium easier to use, more useful, better. But not perfect. And very much not the ultimate car website.