News

We've been working hard on this for a long time. Longer than we'd like to admit.

At some point every rewrite hits the same fork in the road: keep polishing and delay, delay, delay, or ship something and accept that it won't be perfect. We picked the second one.

So, this is not perfect. There are rough edges, missing features, and things that will change. We know. We'd rather have it in your hands and fix it in the open than keep it hidden while we chase a version that never quite arrives.

99.999% of the email I've been getting has been from marketing spammers. Up to 100 emails a day from people who want me to know that they can get my site to the top of every search engine result. This isn't that big a bother, but if you sent me a REAL email in that time, I probably didn't see it. My sincere apologies. I've blocked some of the spammers, and I've added a notifiation system that lets me know when contacts come in so I can *actually* hear from people about things. So, anyway, thanks for being here. Tell me what's broken over on the contact page.

Life can really screw you up if you let it.

It's been a long time since an update was posted here, and that's because it's been a long time since this was developed at all.

The company I was working for ran out of money because they were on the venture capital treadmill, and AI took over the VC mindshare while the bottom fell out of everything else.

So I did what people do, and I joined some friends to build an AI startup. I won't bore you with the details of that except to say that nobody else has done what we were doing, and I still think that what we were doing is a very necessary addition to the AI ecosphere, but we couldn't convince VCs that OpenAI and Anthropic weren't about to release it any minute now. (They haven't yet)

Anyway, in that time I've changed languages a few times, and now I'm rewriting this in golang as a way to better learn golang. That won't mean much to you except that it means that there will be updates.

I’ve gotten a ton of comments and feedback on the site. I haven’t marketed it at all and frankly, haven’t even told anyone that it was online. Regardless, there are a couple-hundred users and I’ve gotten dozens of contact messages that I was not expecting. This is wildly unexpected, but just as much amazing.

Anyway, I promised good news – the good news is that I’m working on the site, and that it isn’t abandonware. I’m looking through the featureset and I’ll be working through them somewhat systematically. This news page now works, and it’s a new feature I built today.

The bad news – “News” is a really dumb feature, and most of you probably won’t even know that it’s been updated. So there will need to be more important features built, which I’ll get to, I promise. The main thing that needs to get done is the core mechanic of the system – I thought originally that I needed one instance of a title, but from the feedback I’m getting, that seems wrong. There’s going to be a major massage coming for titles there that will make it a lot more usable by a lot more people, but without being too messy for the site’s contents.

Anyway, I’ll update more soon, and hopefully have a feature worth writing about.

You’re probably wondering what’s going on here.

That makes sense. You’re smart, and this website… well… we’ll be kind, and suggest that it isn’t smart YET.

It’s a work in progress. It’ll be finished. I promise.

I’ll post something smarter here when the time comes, but there are a few important features that need to be developed before I can say that this is ‘launched.’

For the time being, feel free to register, to use it, and to provide me as much feedback as you’d like to. (Even negative feedback is welcome!)

Otherwise, here are those features I was referring to – I am aiming for them to be finished soon.

The ability to follow other users

An activity feed that lets you know what is happening

Comments / Forums / indieweb-style chats

The ability to vote on role images so that highest voted images can ‘win’ a casting

A transactional mail server that allows me to email you notifications

Social auth

Some user/profile features. Specifically, the ability to supply an avatar and bio and stuff.

The ability to browse titles / roles more easily

An actual news section / blog / something