Well, I had a pretty productive weekend--worked Friday night, Saturday day, and most of Sunday (had to take a break to watch the Falcons move to 8-2!). I finished setting up the hosting for Rankoro.us--two Rackspace Cloud server instances (an admin server and a public facing server) with php, MySQL, memecached, all sorts of monitoring (nagios, munin, AWStats, webalizer), etc. This always takes longer than I would like--one of these days I'm going to checkout chef/opscode.

I put up a basic "Coming Soon" page on Sunday morning to hopefully gather a few email addresses or twitter followers before the launch. The coming soon pages are just html, a few images, and a small script that adds the email addresses to a Constant Contact mailing list. With a little luck I won't just be announcing Rankoro.us to my mom next month.

Actual development got underway on Sunday--44 subversion commits as of this morning. The database is fairly well mapped out, I've got login/register functionality built, and I'm onto the main two pages that compose the app. In order to make sure I have *something* to launch next Tuesday, I'm going to iterate the UI from "simple" and "server-side" to "rich" and "ajaxy". Worse case scenario I'll have a slightly-less-polished-than-I-would-like version.

The November deadline is definitely what I needed. It's got me really focused and I am pretty confident I'll make the deadline. Hopefully the end product will be fun/useful for people.