Thibauld - Imagination and Execution -

10 days after

10 days after... I already received insightful early feedbacks. Well, to sum it up, it would not have been bad... had I not let a bug slip into the debian package of savemyconf-client which prevented it from installing on a freshly installed system! Hopefully, this highly critical problem should now be solved.

Besides that, here are a selection of feedbacks I wanted to blog about today:

• Having only Linux Ubuntu Hardy as supported operating system is a bit restrictive. I guess this is right but it happens that Ubuntu is my primary operating system so it made sense for me to support Ubuntu. Also, this is probably the system I know best so it was easier for me to begin implementing SaveMyConf for Ubuntu. Anyway, for an alpha version, I think this is not much of a problem... I'll try to have more systems supported for v1!
• Not being able to release a website compatible with all browsers is just ridiculous. Indeed, IE is really really badly supported. Blame my small web design experience for this one (and my laziness for not testing regularly with IE). I realized too late that my site was a complete mess on IE (even IE7 has problems). As it was a bit late and as Windows is just not yet supported as an operating system, I decided to release anyway and to put warning messages for people visiting savemyconf with a browser that is basically not firefox. I promise browser compatibility will be a lot enhanced in the next release...
• The back button of my browser does not work. Right, again, I realized this too late. The modifications required would have required too much refactoring so this will be solved for the next release.
• Your double entry navigation system [ndlr: left to choose the machine and top to choose the action] is a bit confusing. Concerning this one, I don't know... I don't have enough feedback to judge yet but it might be true. I wanted to innovate a little bit but I must admit that it might be confusing for normal people. I need more feedback on this one.. What do you think?
• In terms of SEO, your site sucks because google can only view 1 page. True, savemyconf relies a lot on javascript (the whole navigation is ajaxified) and I now realize that I might have gone too far in this direction. I will probably moderate my use of Ajax for the next version to have a more Google / Lynx friendly website.

That's all I can think of right now, please keep the feedbacks coming! They are what will make the next version suck less

PS: As it might help someone else, here is a few more details on my packaging problem: I actually mistook with one build-dependency version which caused the package to miserably fail installing. It came from the following line in the debian/control file of my package:

Build-Depends: cdbs (>=0.4.49), debhelper (>= 5), python-central (>= 0.6)

The python-central dependency version was wrong, I changed 0.6 to 0.5.6 to solve the problem of my package not installing on a fresh Ubuntu Hardy (8.04).