Our Super Secret algorithm is almost done and it may blow your socks off (ours are long gone). Once our algorithm is complete it will allow us to put the finishing touches on the rest of the site, and what’s more important than that? Then we’ll cut the ribbon and christen this baby. If you’d like to make a donation of some bubbly, feel free… we’ll put it to good use!
Why take the stairs when you can ride the elevator?
a graphical representation of the FameThrower process
Things have been hectic here are FameThrower. We have the site together and we are intensively testing our algorithms, render times and usability. We’re upgrading to better hosting, we’ve gone through a series of design revisions, and we may even have t-shirts ready for launch. The toughest challenge thus far has been getting the front page to render on-the-fly, taking in new input and immediately reformatting the page. We don’t want to give the whole shabang away, but know that the front page will be organized in a Dragon Scales format (and no, FameThrower has absolutely nothing to do with Dungeons and Dragons, unless you want it to). When FameThrower is up and running, it will be well worth the wait.
a little taste?
We were hoping to get the site up and running today but it looks like we’ll need at least another 24 hours. We know that this is an inconvenient truth, but we don’t want to put up the site and have our adoring fans be disappointed or worse: confused! Currently we are concentrating on keeping the web page readable, stylish, and easy to use.
We contacted the charity we plan on giving to earlier today, letting them know what FameThrower is all about. But for some reason they still haven’t called us back (it might be because we’ve been on the phone all day)! We’re hoping they get back to us soon, or we may have to move on to our second choice. And if that doesn’t work out, we may just take all this silly money and put it towards scratch tickets.
Yee-haa.
We’re happy to report that progress is going better than expected, sadly this means that we may not be able to launch tomorrow morning. We are upgrading our servers to be prepared for more traffic and we’re working with lawyers to iron out some of our terms and conditions, because we don’t want to get sued!
This means that we won’t know when we are going to launch until right before it happens so make sure to stay tuned in to our progress. It will be this week, but it could literally anytime. On the up side, we’ll be launching with more features to enhance your FameThrower experience than we would had if we were to open to the public tomorrow morning. So bring out your dancing shoes and get ready for a good time.
It looks like we’ve decided which charity we’re going to give to but we’ll probably hold onto that tid bit of information until we go live!
Pay close attention, as we will be updating with more infomation soon!
We know that you’re all still waiting to hear exactly what FameThrower is going to be, so I’m going to tell you… It is going to be… well actually we should probably get your advice on which charity we should give to and then we’ll tell you what FameThrower is all about.
We want to give to a charity that we believe in, which will use our donations efficiently and effectively. This goal led me to charity watch, one of the premiere resources that objectively ranks charities. We trolled through their database, compared it with some of our own ideas, and came up with this list to work with.
In no particular order:
Children’s Hunger Fund – They focuses on getting food to the children who need it most in America and the world.
Americans for the Arts – Their goal is to give every American the opportunity to participate in and appreciate the arts.
Sunshine Foundation – They concentrate on giving terminally ill children one last wish, which their families would not be able to afford on their own.
Pro Literacy Worldwide – They work all over the world to teach illiterate adults and families how to read.
Doctors Without Borders – This international humanitarian group provides emergency aid to people affected by natural disasters or wars or who don’t have access to health care.
I don’t know when we are going to decide which charity to give half our profits to, but I can tell you that it’s going to be soon. If you have any other suggestions now is the time!
Development is going faster today that it did yesterday. We now have all the features worked out and we’re just checking off the list as we go. We’ve also decided to use Google Checkout to keep payments as secure and reliable as possible. Now we can be certain that anyone can make a purchase with ease and confidence.
In other news, we still haven’t picked a charity but we’re getting closer. Ideally we’re looking for one where FameThrower can make an impressive impact. Maybe in the future we’ll let you pick which charity you’d like to give to, but for now, it will be easier to stick to one.
Gotta love it!
We don’t want to ruin the ‘big’ surprise but we just couldn’t wait to give everyone a taste of what famethrower is going to be, so we thought we’d share some of the taglines we’ve come up thus far:
Don’t worry it will all become clear soon!
We know that our company is a little bit silly so we figured that we should probably put it to good use. After some careful thought we’ve decided that we are going to donate 50% of all of our profits to a charity.
We haven’t yet decided which charity we should give to, although we are adding that decision to the top of the “big board”. If you have any suggestions let us know!
That reminds me, if you have any questions or comments in general feel free to contact us and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
We made it through that lightning storm, worked for a few hours and finally got some sleep.
We woke up with a flash of new ideas about ways to improve the site and we’re working our way through them currently. In a few hours we should have a splash site up at famethrower and we should hopefully have some of our organization algorithms taken care of by the end of the day. Then we just implement rinse and repeat.
We need to decide what the best form of promotion is going to be… we want things to ramp up quickly and we think that it’s possible if we can get our idea in front of the right people. Should we try to promote the blog, the splash site or should we wait for the whole thing to be done? Let us know what you think!
I’ll leave you with a question famethrower will answer: What would you do for fame?
We continue to plug along. Our domain, famethrower.com, is now forwarding to our hosting! Hopefully at some point tomorrow we’ll put a little splash page up to tide everyone over until the real thing comes out this weekend.
We finished the basic design layout and development is underway but it appears that we’ve found our way into a lightning storm (or rather its found us), so we’re currently experiencing some brown-outs. Assuming the power stays on I think we can make some major strides in the next couple of hours.
That’s two items off the board!
