What I've Learned from Codenone

I haven't blogged in English for quite a long time. Today should be a good occasion to practice my writing skill again.

I'm writting this article for the first 24 hrs. celebration of Codenone grand opening :)

For you readers who come to this entry via googling, or else, Codenone is yet another developers community for somethings called "alternative languages". It focuses on Python and Ruby but all other emerging languages are welcome as well.

The number of these developers is relatively few in Thailand, comparing with the mainstream platform like Java, .NET or PHP. So I don't expect Codenone to be mass-targeted and huge community as Blognone (my Slashdot-liked site). Anyway, first 24 hrs. of Codenone received a warm welcome, we got 142 members since the web engine was up. Thanks for all people and Blognone's influence.

Sugree wrote a blog entry about how Codenone was set up (in Thai). I'd like to re-tell the story again in my view.

We had started at the night of Sunday 7th January when Roofimon (the host owner) finished the Drupal installation. While waiting for Roofimon, I worked on the site presentation (theme and icon) in pararell to save time. I chose to base on a new theme instead of Blognone one to make distinction. Fortunately, Arc Materia on Drupal.org fitted most of my need.

Another job was to find site icon to replace Drupal's Drop icon in site heading. Since I'm Gnome user, I knew Tango provide me a complete icon set in SVG, so I looked up in my /usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable for a icon that is related with "programming". After tweaking it with Inkscape (and some of Keng's help to make a glossy badge), Codenone theme was ready.

Next process was configuring Drupal. I'm experienced Drupal user because of Blognone and this Isriya.com site so this job was trivial. Drupal 5.0 RC1 changes the admin interface quite much from Drupal 4.7 but that's not the big problem.

Firstly, I intended to announce Codenone opening by midnight but we find a bug about distributed authentication system in RC1 so the opening was delayed to 8am in the next morning (8th Jan). The bug detail is in Sugree's blog mentioned above, and thanks him again for solving this problem. You're my hero, Sugree!

Let's get into point before this entry will be too long :) My point is "How long does a web site need for setting up?"

In my case, it took only 2 hours (I don't count the time we spent for bug). Quite fast in my opinion.

The present day is Google-oriented era and 3 months seem to be forever. Don't spend too much time for procedural things like setting up a web site. The ready-to-use CMSs are all around, the pre-package themes are all around too and the good quality, free license icons are lied on your hard drive already. Be mix and match. Don't reinvent the wheel, we have learned from Open Source period and this time is for Mashup. Spend time on creativity things such as "how to get more users" or "how to create a sustainable community" rather than the technical issues and finally, outsource everything you can. (I outsourced statistic tracking to Google Analytics and user registration to Blognone)

All above is what I've learned from setting up several web sites and I think they are quite essential aspect for Web 2.0 era.