mashable

we will rock you!

I know usually when i say i’ve been busy it means i’ve spent a few hours doing some work online in between general surfing or on/off work…

But all this week, i’ve literally been ‘working’ morning to night… 10.30 am to 3am. Obviously i have lunch/dinner etc… and might be away in town for the odd hour, but all of this week, i’ve been working roughly 13/ 14 hours a day.

So about 65 hours in total mon-fri (now)

What the hell have i been doing then?! 99% BeerChief work. There’s far too much to mention it all but i’ll try to round it up…

• put two small sites up for sale, sold one, transferred site & domain.
• custom designed BeerChief blog and got it respectable looking for launch
• custom designed new BeerChief homepage
• added about 20 beers with descriptions and images
• send out mass emails to over 140 BeerChief subscribers
• compiled a list of 17 known bugs with screenshots and reports for our development team
• fixed 3 bugs myself, one with ‘tags’, one with non-logged in members, the other with profile icons
• responded to all feedback
• analyzed all feedback and pulled it all together in bullet points
• put together prototype template designs for BeerChief v2
• compiled a list of new/essential features we need for v2
• custom designed some new icons for BeerChief
• greeted & added most new members to our ‘featured’ members section on the site
• analyzed traffic stats and put together some early projections
• had several lengthly email conversations with adam (we’ve sent over 70 emails to each other in the past 7 days)
• uploaded several videos to BeerChief and generally tried to test everything out as much as possible
• made blog posts on this blog

Really not much time to think… i would never have predicted i’d be this busy, but then again i would never have predicted we’d have so much feedback and so many members in the first few days - i thought i’d actually have to promote the site to get members.

So the fact most of the feedback has been (a) positive (b) constructive / helpful has just spurred me on to work even harder and push not only myself, but BeerChief to it’s limits. We have some MASSIVE new changes on the way and i’d go so far as to say it’s almost a complete site revamp.

The layout/design will remain somewhat similar but the whole site will be AJAXed and more ‘cutting edge’. It could backfire horrendously - nobody likes too much flashy stuff, but i don’t think so. Myself and Adam both agree the current site is ‘good’ but we ourselves wouldn’t go telling our friends about it.

We’re both in agreement we would tell our friends about version 2. That’s how much an improvement it is. An improvement, which in many people’s eyes, isn’t necessary or indeed possible but we’re both perfectionists and demand the best.

To cap off a great week, BeerChief has been mentioned on the frontpage of Mashable - mashable is one of the few blogs i read on a daily basis and has over 180k RSS subscribers. It’s one of the biggest blogs on the net and none other than Pete Cashmore himself (founder) wrote the post

We must be doing something right if we’re being mentioned on sites of that caliber

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