Over the past few weeks I’ve been adding features, shifting servers and generally just getting T Incorporated into top shape. I’m glad I went ahead and launched but I found it a bit frustrating that I’ve been spending my time working on T Incorporated and not writing. So, now that things have finally settled down a bit (I’m not rebooting my server every 10 minutes anymore) I’d like to talk a bit about some of the design decisions that went into T Incorporated.
First, the goals:
I wanted to incorporate all of the stuff I do online. Well, at least almost all of it. I upload photos to Flickr, post my status to Twitter, create links in del.icio.us, write blog posts, etc. and I wanted to get them in one location, but in a structured way.
I wanted the site to be at least somewhat lasting. I tend to get in the habit of wanting to redesign my personal site often and I wanted to try and find a way to keep from doing that.
I wanted the site to be flexible. I often change my mind or think up new ideas and I didn’t want to have to redesign the site every time I thought of something.
I wanted the site to be representative of me.
A few months ago I was riding the subway out to Coney Island during a visit to New York and I had an idea. It wasn’t necessarily a new idea, but it stuck. I wanted to incorporate my life online. Sure, I’ve had ideas like this in the past. I’ve even tried using tools built on web development frameworks to make it happen, but this time I had some help. After a few conversations over ping pong with my good friend and co-worker Jeff Croft I realized how I could make it a reality. He was working on a framework in Django that sounded perfect, and I was willing to be a bug tester and spend some long nights learning some Django templates. The forces of geek were in full swing.
The concepts had been rolling around in my head for a while, so I started in on some initial designs, worked out some basic templates and have been iterating and implementing on what’s here now since. It’s me, or as some friends call me, T, and almost all my online publishing “incorporated” onto one site. Hence the name, T Incorporated.