Login bug fixed
Google mail is being renamed to Gmail and I found that when I logged into diddydonation with my new email address, all my donations had disappeared! Luckily, this was only a minor code bug because Google already anticipated that their users might change their gmail addresses and so give a unique user_id that doesn’t ever change. It only took half an hour to fix DiddyDonations. GAE is a really nice piece of software to develop on, you get soooo much for free and so many of the common webapp problems have been pre-solved for you.
Home sweet Home
When you launch a Google App Engine application you get given a free domain by Google – I got given http://diddydonation.appspot.com. However, it was surprisingly easy to move to a custom domain – I have moved to www.diddydonation.com. The Google docs were very very helpful in showing me how to do it and it didn’t cost a penny. All I had to do was register my business (Bitvolution) with Google Apps and then set DiddyDonation as a domain alias. Google gave me all the DNS settings I needed and it only took a couple of hours to complete.
As a hat tip to App Engine, I donated to them – This marks the start of my dogfooding.
Hello world!
So, I guess DiddyDonation is born! I uploaded the latest code to a public URL following the release early, release often mantra.
The extreme basics of the website should be more or less working – just enough for me to start playing around with it. There is currently no way to actually handle real money. This will come when needed. I anticipate being stuck in a chicken and egg situation for a long time (probably forever?) where the site is not useful until many people use it but no-one will want to use it until it’s actually useful.
Diddydonation is launching with the following simple features:
- Pledge a 1p donation to any webpage (i.e. URL).
- View your list of pledges. Add 1p, remove 1p or delete a pledge.
- Install the Bookmarklet in order to Diddydonate to any webpage with 1 click without needing to login to DiddyDonation.com.
- A Blog to communicate about the project. A FAQ and About page.
Implementation details:
- Implemented in Python using the Google App Engine.
- Uses the Git Version Control System, hosted on github.