Diana went to Tacoma for a knitting thing today, so I had Simon for most of the day. Oddly enough, I got a ton of work done during his two two-hour naps.
Walt and I came up with the idea for MouseZoom three years ago. It wasn't even called that at the time, and for that matter, the technology used in the key feature didn't exist. MVC didn't exist either. I am not proud of the fact that it has gone this long, and I take a lot of responsibility for it since I'm the developer and Walt is the content guy.
A friend of mine asked me why the hell we would want to build a Disney World fan site. There are already too many of them. We pretty much agree. That's why we had more conversations initially about what it shouldn't be than what it should. We're not interested in it becoming all things for all people. We just want to share some photos that we think are pretty good, and present them in a way that is above average. I think we can do that. Above all other reasons, we're fans, and we want to offer a tribute in our own way.
In some ways, we learned what not to do when we joined Guide to The Point and Virtual Midway to make PointBuzz. We learned that maintaining a ton of content that's easily found in other places (like the official site) was a waste of energy. No one really looked at it and it got stale.
We're going to launch a preview soon. Walt has a new awesome design we're going to do. POP Forums v9 is starting to come together. I'm not sure how the server is going to react, but that's part of the reason I started shelling out more money last year for better hardware.
I hope we can seed the community to be one similar to CoasterBuzz. It's kind of like the anti-enthusiast enthusiast crowd. Sure, they know their G-forces and manufacturers, but many folks still come off as well-rounded people with diverse interests. That's who we want. We aren't trying to attract the uber-nerds.
Three years. Wow, I actually took time off from Insurance.com to score the first photos for that site, in 2008!
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