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Being a First User
By Dave Winer on Tuesday, May 01, 2012 at 2:05 PM.
A lot of things are working now in the WorldOutline, so I've really slowed down the development work and am spending a lot of time trying things out just using the product.  permalink
I used to do this at Living Videotext, a long time ago. Back then, I wasn't coding the product, so I got to play a different role in the development process. I called that role First User. I would use the product to do the things it was intended to do, and in doing so would bump up against loose-ends or rough edges. I would then communicate them to the lead developer, in a daily meeting.  permalink
I would always bring my notebook, which was a physical thing, because the tool I was working on was a notetaking tool. I needed to have some other work to use the product for, which wasn't a problem because I was also the CEO of the company (my Day Job) and was working with a lot of other people on a lot of projects. That's what a CEO does. Juggles lots of things, all of them important, some tedious, but necessary -- and others more than necessary, crucial to our success. Making sure the product could be used for what it was meant to do was somewhere between necessary and crucial. And it was also a matter of honor. One of my pet peeves are products that have glitches that every user must see. That means the company either didn't know or didn't care. By glitch, I mean an annoyance that could be easily fixed.  permalink
The project I'm playing with is the "threads" app. It uses Disqus for comments, and all of it is embedded in the Bootstrap 2 environment. So I can use any of the gizmos or doodads that they define there. (This gives me an idea, Disqus should have a switch that allows me to tell it that it's running inside Boostrap and it could use their doodads and gizmos too.) permalink
Here's the example that goes with this post. permalink
The menu you see at the top of the screen is the one I'm going to use to tie together all the scripting.com sites. They don't all have the same menu, but they should. That will happen when all my content is flowing through this engine. That might be a very long time from now. :-) permalink
BTW, I set the menu for a page, or a site by setting the menuName attribute to the name of the menu. There is no command yet for setting that attribute in the OPML Editor, but I can do it with a one-line script.  permalink
op.attributes.setone ("menuName", "scriptingNewsMenu") permalink
That's the advantage of having your editor be a scripting environment too. :-) permalink
Also one of the things that comes out of using your product as it was intended to be used, is that you learn how to explain in very few words what its intended purpose is. As you're developing it, especially if you're not following in someone else's footsteps, that can be a hard thing to come up with.  permalink
I've created an abbreviated version of this post on the threads site in case you'd care to comment, or have a question. permalink
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