Introduction
I know most people here by now know that I have been fairly busy with the Steemit Worldmap as of late @steemitworldmap. I was asked by @aggroed to write up how I experienced developing the map, and see if I can give tips to others who would like to start their own project. I will do this through telling my story behind the development of the Steemit Worldmap.
If we're going to tell this story properly, I should give a little background. Last year I was supposed to start a business. I wanted to rent out inflatable boats in my hometown, Ghent, Belgium. It seemed a lovely project. It would allow me to work during summer and I'd be able to travel during winter.
The problem with Belgium is that you have to jump through dozens of bureaucratic hoops, and well the last one managed to trip me and I landed flat on my face. I had to quit the business. From one day to another, I was four thousand euros in debt and saw my dreamed-up future shatter. At that point a person has two options: drown in self pity, or get the hell back up and move on!
Oddly enough, I've never felt too bad about losing the business. It allowed me to put time again in my social life and other projects I had postponed over and over again. I started writing again. This is what brought me to Steemit. Within my first week, I got invited to the PAL discord group and met a bunch of lovely people who helped me with my writing - a lot!
With all this extra time I had, I wanted to start a project I would enjoy working on, while being able to give something back to the Steemit community. Suddenly it hit me, how awesome wouldn't it be if you could automatically put your posts on a map! Enter Steemit Worldmap, the project started taking shape in my head. I reached out to @blueorgy and he decided to help out on the project. I would focus on the worldmap side of things, and he would focus on the Steemit side!
Two weeks later we launched the first version of Steemit Worldmap, for more info you check out the intro-post.
Launching your awesome project
So you've finished coding your project. You and the team have tested it and everything seems to be working well. After you've announced the launch, it's time to take the day off and come back later, right? You're exhausted and could use a day off.
No, no and no! It's better to take a day off before you launch. I know, it isn't easy to do, you've finished your project and want to share it with the world! But take my word for it, every single launch has bugs. You need to be there to fix them, right after launch.
After your initial launch, your workload doubles. Suddenly you are on the clock, can't launch and leave all the bugs in. On top of that you need to reach out to the users who found the bugs, let them know you're working on it. Meanwhile hoping like hell your one fix doesn't break something else.
Make it user friendly - ALL THE WAY
This is one where I personally messed up at one point, and now it's incredibly hard to change it. My mistake: I didn't really research my potential audience. If I had done so, I would've noticed, not everyone is as technically inclined as I am. While the code blurb to put in the post feels "easy" for me. Up to today we still have users who make mistakes with it and it's my fault, not theirs! If I had done the research, I would've known that I had to put more focus on making the code easier to use. "So change it now?", I can hear you ask. But changing it now, would mean all the already accustomed users would be confused. So now I have to work on an extensive tutorial, which again, feels less user-friendly and in turn leads to less users.
I had focused my entire user-friendliness on the map itself. But I totally didn't think of making the FIRST STEP just as user-friendly.
Lesson learned for the future!
Listen to the ideas and criticism from your users
I'm not saying you have to implement every change a user would like. But if you see a similar idea arising multiple times, you should seriously start considering it.
When I started the Steemit Worldmap, I initially thought only travelers would use it. I wanted it to be a personal travel-guide. But quickly I saw people wanted to use it for tons of different things. But the map's infrastructure wasn't really set up for that. You could only search on author and on location, as I had in mind travel would always be the subject.
I gave it some thought, and decided to improve the map with multiple search terms. Now it can be used for everything, and people can still look for the subject they're interested in because we made the posts searchable on tags (among other things). Because I didn't want to entirely remove the personal-guide-map idea, I've added an Editors Choice map, just for the posts that I felt were the best within that category!
Fixing bugs
Oh how I have cursed at my screen. Sometimes you are just unable to figure out what is going wrong, even where it's going wrong. No error message, nothing. It just doesn't work. Every developer has been there. It's hell.
I think the best advice I can give is: take a break and come back later to re-read your code. If I had done that, I wouldn't have spend over three hours trying to change up things, while the mistake was a small typo.
For those of you who have experience with coding; in an ajax call I had typed succes instead of success, you can fill in the blanks.
If you're still unable to find it after your break and taking a look at it in peace: Stack Overflow is your best friend!
1. Go to the Witness Voting Page on Steemit.com
2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and locate the vote box
3. Type (blueorgy) in the box and click vote.