Baby Steps

I'm still in the planning stages of this new site revamp. There are a ton of things I need to consider before setting out of this project.

My theory is that success requires 4 ingredients:

1. Ability to conceive the idea
   
2. Ability to achieve the idea
   
3. The drive to work on the idea (requires steady focus and interest)
   
4. The time to work on the idea
   

All parts are necessary for success. And in a one-person project, this singular person must possess these qualities. I believe the most difficult piece to attain is the drive and time.

In an earlier post, I've spoke of revamping the look and feel of the site and updating the logo. Before I work on the aesthetics, I'm going to break up the functional parts of the new site and make sure I have the code ready to make each piece work in a clean installation of Joomla!.

The pieces (ordered by importance):

• Ajax loader to display deal on request
• Customized RSS.
• Group deals by deal site, merchant and categories. Joomla! has "categories" and "sections". Joomla! only allows one category per story/deal.
• Show latest deals on homepage grouped by deal site.
• Have a page to show all deals collected in the past 24 hours.
• Automated periodic caching of the pages. Since I plan for the traffic to spike, I'll need to consider load and bandwidth. Caching PHP pages into HTML will certainly help.
• Scraper scripts can post deals to the Joomla! system.
• Newsletter (new idea to help drive traffic) - not as important
  

There will be more but these are the absolutely the most important. First thing to tackle will be to do a fresh install of Joomla! and either find an Ajax module or build one myself!


On a side note: My pagerank has went up today! Mother of all deals is now page ranked 4! Congrats to me! :-)