Site Launch: No Christmas Gifts This Year

Today we launched our newest project with Ramit Sethi at nochristmasgiftsthisyear.com.

This is meant to coincide with his Save $1000 in 30 Days challenge (that I also wrote about here).

The project is a combination of a mad libs style input plus an e-card system. You can fill out the content for the e-card, pick an image, pick a card background and send it to a loved one.

Here’s a few interesting things about this project:

• It was rapidly developed using the Code Igniter PHP framework. This is my second project using it and am I huge fan so far.
• Over 90% of the code was done in one six-hour day.
• Getting a random sized string to correctly fit in a fixed size box is a huge pain. My solution was a pretty bad hack-job. Would love to find a better way to do it.
• The irreverent Santa image is the most popular one so far.
• We all know IE6 sucks. But IE7 starts to really suck if you have to many PNG background images.
• I still suck at testing. I have to rely on other people to test and submit the bugs.

This was definitely a fun project. I got to code a few things I’ve never done before and have it get slammed with traffic right on launch day.

Rock on.