We flipped the switch almost two weeks ago and for the most part things are running smoothly. We found some problems with classifieds which have been fixed… image uploads were a little buggy, and the submission forms were misbehaving. These things have been resolved but we’re still having a little problem with ads that have big images (more than 250k) added to them… this situation seems to be sending the user back to the homepage instead of ad preview! Groan. This should be resolved shortly.

Other than that, everything looks like it’s in good shape. I just emailed everyone who asked to be notified of our launch (didn’t want to do that until all of our bigger bugs got fixed), plus I finally told the fine folks I met at Ribfest that their pictures are on the site. Hopefully this will kick our traffic up a little bit.

Pretty boring update, huh? Yeah, I know. Just for fun, I’ll post a pic of the weirdest dude I met at Ribfest. He kind of came across as some sort of mad genius… he was very articulate and well spoken, and he kept telling me about various oddities including some kind of Pythagorean pyramid formula. And (drum roll)…… here he is! Ack!

A few hours ago… at about 1:18 am CDT, to be more exact… the new Naperthrill.com went live! There are still a couple of outstanding issues with Firefox browsers but all of our major features are working and we’re ready to start filling the site with restaurant reviews, classified ads, videos, and local events. We should have more complete Firefox compatibility within the next few days.

And guess what? We already have one classified ad that’s been posted as a result of some emails I sent out to craigslist users! The title is “Looking for a normal cool gay guy”. Ha! Naperville’s pretty conservative, so it’s kind of funny (in an ironic sort of way) that our very first user submission is a call for gay love. We had a little debate over whether or not our M4M and W4W personals section is going to piss off the Religious Right, but hopefully people who find that stuff distasteful will have the good sense to not click on it. However, I really am hoping we don’t get too many people posting pics of their weiners (those ads will be deleted)… that’s a big no-no when you’re trying to promote a community website in a family-oriented place like Naperville.

So that’s it. No press conference, no balloon drop, no champagne (although I did crack open a High Life - it is the Champagne of Beers, after all). It’s just a nice quiet soft launch that will help us to smooth out whatever rough edges remain before we start our shameless campaign for publicity.

Yesterday my brother and I both went to Naperville to photograph the splendor of Ribfest (and Naperville in general) for our homepage, but the irony is that we never saw each other! We were planning to go together but I got held up because I needed to get some cards printed with our logo plus I also realized that I had to buy a new camera because my old one crapped out on me after five years of abuse.

As it turns out, I spent most of my time running around downtown Naperville taking pictures of complete strangers who seemed more interested in avoiding the mob at Knoch Park than being part of it, so even if we’d gone together it really wouldn’t have mattered. I found plenty of folks camped out at Features, The Lantern, Jimmy’s, and other spots and, surprisingly, just about everyone was willing to sit still for my camera… I was really expecting more people to tell me to go to hell! It probably helped that most of the people I approached had a drink or three in them.

Less surprising was the overall positive reaction to my Naperthrill elevator pitch. I suspected people would be into it - you don’t spend years building something because you think people will hate it - but some affirmation never hurts.

We’re really close to being ready for the soft launch… the only major thing left is overhauling the Naperville Restaurant Guide. Brace yourselves, this is gonna be huuuuuuuuge.

According to this article, “Texas based ISP Redmoon has implemented software that hijacks pages being visited by their customers by placing Redmoon’s own ads on these pages.”

Ugh! Aside from being evil and wrong, plastering your own ads on someone else’s website is like putting the words SUE ME on a giant billboard. I don’t think anyone in the Naperville/Chicago area is doing this, but if they start to please please please let us know so that we can start lining up attorneys to sue the crap out of them!! Ok? Thanks.

We’re almost there. Our engineer has a crazy amount of work to do before we unveil the new Naperthrill.com in a little over a week… sucks to be you Patrick!!

Even though we’ll be going live, we won’t be going on any all-out advertising blitz because we want to kind of phase people into it. In other words, we want to make sure it passes the test of real-world use on a small scale before screaming at everyone in Naperville to get in on it (that would be large scale). Yeah yeah, I know - we’ve already done a bunch of testing - but strapping your friends to chairs and forcing them to test the site is quite different from having complete strangers start using it voluntarily.

One caveat I want to throw out there is that, even after launching in July, there will still be plenty of small fixes that need to get done (another reason to keep the launch semi-quiet!). Don’t get me wrong, the site as a whole will be perfectly functional, but it’ll take some time for us to get to some of the lower priority things that need attention such as reworking the way “platonic only” personal ads are displayed, making adjustments to how comments are posted on videos and events, that kind of thing. There are also some higher-priority items that are just going to take time, such as improving our search function. We don’t have Google’s resources, so putting together an “intelligent” search isn’t as easy as the big guys make it look.

Despite the low-key reopening of the site, we’re pretty excited to be at this stage. It’s been a long time coming.

Now that it’s almost summer (it doesn’t “officially” start until June 21), I feel compelled to take a break from talking about Thrill and focus on the #1 threat to America: BEARS.

Last night I was watching the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet or something, and it was a show about bears. Did you know they can run like 35 mph?? Holy crap! Campers beware.

So now you know that running away from an angry bear ain’t gonna save your hide unless that bear’s wearing a Superbowl ring and likes to be called The Fridge. You’ll have far better luck chucking cans of Milwaukee’s Best and screaming like a soccer mom at a PTA meeting.

That’s all. Good luck not getting mauled by Yogi & Boo Boo.

The test version of our restaurant guide blows, which you probably already know if you read my last post. In the course of combing through all of the comments made by our testers, we had a long talk about what to do with this little conundrum and a couple of crappy ideas were tossed around. How are we supposed to create a true “restaurant guide” when we have a limited amount of editorial content on hand and no money to pay for a bunch more?

We hemmed and hawed, and then our engineer Patrick came up with a pretty sweet solution: a Top 10 list based on user votes! It’s perfect. It addresses the near-unanimous feedback that we need to give users restaurant suggestions and reviews, it’s consistent with our user-generated-content model, and it’s something that has the potential to be different every day. It may take some time for voting to cause daily changes, but it’ll happen eventually. Plus, we already have the voting structure in place, so it’s a no-brainer.

We already have a Weekly Editorial Review, local reviews (the engine for the Top 10), and the ability to let people browse restaurants by name or by cuisine type. Throw in the Top 10 as the main attraction among these other features and, voila, we have a Restaurant Guide. Granted, it’s not the perfect RG, but it’s the best we can do right now and I think it’ll go over well with the general public.

One other problem that requires major fixing is our homepage which, as of this moment, is horrendously bad. A redesign has already been laid out and just needs to be built - it’s waaaaaaaaaaay better. Pretty much the same info as the current version, but much prettier and one (small) additional feature is going to be added as a result.

There’s still more test feedback to go through, but so far we’ve done a pretty good job of taking the test results to heart and a lot of progress has been made on improving the things our testers have pointed out. Now if we go back for a second round of feedback and they all say that the Homepage and RG still look like crap, then we’re gonna be in trouble! But that won’t happen because I’ll beat our test group senseless before they can get a negative word out, and they know it.

We’ve gotten some more test results in, and here’s what we’ve learned so far:

• Our homepage sucks. As of right now, our homepage has very little in the way of graphics and this doesn’t exactly excite the people who have seen it so far. We privately rationalized the text-heavy layout by pointing out that craigslist doesn’t have graphics and they’re doing just fine. Problem is, we’re not craigslist. We’re going to put in photos and we’ll find a way to keep them fresh.
• People are having a hard time posting stuff. They’re getting the process started ok, and they don’t have much trouble with inputting their classified ad or whatever it is, but they seem to think they’re done with it when they’re really not. This is because our Preview step isn’t clearly being seen as a preview - people are viewing it as a confirmation that they’re finished posting. This is gonna get fixed.
• People are using fake email addresses for posting stuff. We need to let unregistered users know that they have to use a real email address or they won’t be able to finish posting - they have to get an email and click a link.
• Search needs to get better. There’s always going to be room for improvement here, but there are some very specific things that need to be done right now to make search results more useful.
• Our Restaurant Guide needs a lot of work. We already knew this, but we’ve gotten some very good feedback on what should go on the Restaurants page.

The list goes on, but these are a few of the bigger things that need attention. Damn we got a lotta work to do!!

Well it’s been a while since this blog was born… frankly, there hasn’t been much that we could write about publically. We’ve been building the site, making decisions, fine tuning, yada yada yada. But we’re just about ready to release the next incarnation of Naperthrill.com! See my last post (yeah, the one from 9 months ago) for a view of what the old Naperthrill looked like.

Today (yesterday, really, since it’s past midnight) is kind of significant because we just finished the first of our in-person site tests. I suckered a couple of unlucky souls into testing all of the major functions of the site; we did crazy stuff like finding pizza joints through the Yellow Pages, posting classified ads, posting videos on NaperTube, and posting events in the Naperville Event Calendar. The testing itself was tedious at times, but it paid off. Our testers opened our eyes to some subtle yet important deficiencies in how the site operates and also made some really good suggestions that are now classified as Super Secret for the time being. We probably don’t need to be so stingy with casual suggestions thrown out by test subjects, but I like to annoy people by making them think I have juicy secrets, plus it makes me feel cool and important.

More tests are scheduled, and once our test phase is complete we’ll go through a (hopefully) short debugging period. After that, we’ll flip the switch and turn on the lights! Prepare to be dazzled.

Since this is the first post on naperthrillblog.com, I should probably start by introducing myself or talking about why we’re blogging or blah blah blah… but the first order of business here is to pat myself and my partners on the back for starting Naperthrill.com 5 years ago today! Or maybe we all deserve a kick in the pants. See, we first went online on Sept. 1, 2001 and after that the site kind of floundered while we made a couple of half-assed efforts at promoting it. In retrospect, the site sucked pretty bad. We didn’t really have any content to speak of and overall I’d have to say we were a little (or perhaps a lot) shy of being ready for such a big undertaking. Things have changed.

After the launch, a lot of stuff happened. I wound up leaving the country to go party in Korea for a few years, my brother bought a house, our engineer got married, and poor Naperthrill kind of got kicked to curb for a while. Normally this kind of delay would be a bad thing, but in our case I’m pretty sure it was just what we needed. Here we are, five years and numerous independent development projects later, and we’re ready to dominate the world, starting with Naperville!

Right now, “Naperthrill Beta” features a big craigslist-like classifieds section (yes, it’s free and no, you don’t have to register) plus we have a massive Yellow Pages directory complete with live Google maps. It’s pretty sweet. Funny thing is, we made feeble attempts at implementing both of these tools in 2001 and didn’t quite get there. What a difference half a decade makes.

I’ve got plenty of things to ramble on about, but I’ll stop here for now. Happy 5th to us!! Naperthrill.com’s next five years will be a lot more exciting, we promise.

Yikes… those red text links were pretty hideous