Moving Away From Mock Data

Since getting back from holidays in the U.S., I've been moving the platform off its mock data. I'd reached a point where I needed to see it clean, and to stop piling more and more onto a pretend foundation. That also meant landing on a proper setup, with a real development environment and a real production one.

It meant inviting the very first person to try it: myself. That's why the who-we-are page now shows one hiker.

So your character page, your Garage (your gear inventory) and your pack lists are all live in there now. Trips, the planning and the prep, are following close behind.

From here I'm turning to the user journeys, making the individual parts more complete, before I invite the first five hikers from the waiting list. With a bit of luck, I'll plan an autumn trip I really feel I need, on the platform itself.

Putting Up Our Terms

Getting ready for those first hikers, I've put up the platform's first terms. They boil down to two things: no assholes, and your data is yours. They're terms anyone can read and understand, with a little in there about what runs under the hood of the web application.

A Forum for Feedback

I've also built an in-house forum, which I hope earns its keep once invited hikers start poking around. We're in alpha, so there will be bugs, and there will be things we change, sometimes dramatically. Better to have one good place to talk about it.

Newsletter and Waiting List

Lastly, there's now a dedicated newsletter page and a dedicated waiting list page, so both get indexed and are easy to share.

I can't wait to invite the first hikers and see what happens.

– Caspar