The first day has gone well. I announced the code on the Twitter dev list, and got 16 visitors to the site. The good thing is that the average pages per visitor was 7, and they spent an average of 11 minutes on the site. So people who get to the code are giving it a good amount of attention.
I’m also using this code as an starting point to teach my son Web programming. He has taken a course in Java in school, and has experience setting up WordPress blogs, but hasn’t done any PHP or server based coding. Working through the install process for 140dev with him was very informative. I’m going to rewrite the install page for the Twitter Database Server based on his feedback.
The biggest problem is identifying the target audience. Is it people who have never used Telnet or worked at a Unix-style prompt? Is it someone who has coded in PHP for a while, but has never used the Twitter API? One solution is to produce tutorials and programming primers to help bridge this gap.
I also want to make the install process much simpler. That is the obvious blocking point. If I can make the install on the database server module easy, the rest of the framework will be a breeze.
Overall, I’m happy with the first day’s results.
