After several months of part-time toil, my pet project is finally live. Yes, it’s been a long time coming, but Protagonize is now up and running and completely open to the public. Aside from being sleep deprived and having spent the better part of my Christmas holidays so far working on the site, I’ve still got a few tweaks to make, little kinks to work out, and a bunch of changes in the pipe that I’d like to get done before the new year. So far, so good.

The process of establishing the guts of the site now seems pretty trivial in contrast to all the polish I’ve put into it over the last few weeks. I managed to squeeze in several features that I hadn’t planned on having ready at launch (specifically, a whole whack of RSS feeds, a few usability enhancements, and some infrastructure niceties that should save me a lot of time deploying new releases.) I’m quite happy with the state of the site at launch — it’s more full-featured and stable than a lot of other products and sites that have been beta for months (or years, in some cases.) The hosting environment I have it on should do for the time being, but if I start generating even a decent amount of traffic on a monthly basis, I’ll probably have to move it to its own server somewhere. Time will tell.

I have high hopes for the site in the long run, but realistically, I’m doing the grassroots thing and marketing the site myself on a variety of social news sites, message forums and groups, and blogs. I’ve already seen a little traffic trickling in from the sites I’ve posted to in the last few hours, and considering it’s the middle of the night over here in YVR, I’m hoping to get a decent flow moving in the morning.

Assuming this works out well, Protagonize should be only the tip of the iceberg — I have three other projects in the planning and design stages, so I should be busy for months to come.

In the meantime, sign up for an account, peruse the site, and go forth and write!

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Posted in General, Technology, Web 2.0, Work |

Tags: protagonize, community, writing, creative, collaboration, interactive+fiction, protagonize.com