3 July 2008
Matt is alive. Feel free to introduce yourself.
I’m excited to announce that Matt, our brand new little web app is live! He lives at TheMattinator.com.
I’d like to say a massive thank you to the Carsonified Team …
* Keir and Elliott – You did amazing. Especially since you’re brand new to Django and Python.
* Mike – Your design skills amaze all of us. Well done.
* Tashkins – Your logistical support and PR prowess were impressive.
* Jo – Thanks for being my right-hand girl for blogging. You did fab.
* Lou – Great job on the copy and PR. You’re always so helpful and I appreciate it.
* Dom – Great job getting the word out to all the Carsonites around the world. I love your emails.
* Will – You’re a natural at PR – great job on working with VentureBeat.
* Gill – Couldn’t have done it without your support from home. I love you.
Finally, I’d like to thank all of you who support us and constantly cheer us on. You rock.
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Mark
# July 3, 2008 - 5:26 pm
Guys, just looking at the site makes me happy! Great work! Now if only I had more than one Twitter account ;)
Gavin
# July 3, 2008 - 5:29 pm
Very nice work guys, love the site, love the idea and just a big congrats on getting it all finished in time!
Job well done!
Gavin
Michael Grinstead
# July 3, 2008 - 5:32 pm
Congrats guys, wish I was there :)
Sam Hardacre
# July 3, 2008 - 5:32 pm
Well done Carsonified! It’s a beautiful site : ) It’s making me think of a purpose to start more than one Twitter account now : D
mahmoud
# July 3, 2008 - 5:40 pm
great job guys, but I gotta ask: what brand are those bean bag chairs? I need one of those :)
andyjamesdavies
# July 3, 2008 - 5:45 pm
Looks awsome, really love the design, I think I need to ask if we can get some lush bean bags like that at distilled!
Ian Fleeton
# July 3, 2008 - 5:51 pm
In four days that’s really good going, well done! Also, love the cartoons!
Tyler Galpin
# July 3, 2008 - 5:51 pm
Great work guys/gals!
The site looks great and it’s a neat idea
Now to launch a second Twitter account :D
Paul Chaney
# July 3, 2008 - 5:54 pm
Hi, Matt. I’m Paul. I just tried you out and, well, I think you’re a hit. And you were born after just four days of gestation. That is incredible.
Congrats Carson on a job not only well done but fully documented too!
Sherwin Techico
# July 3, 2008 - 5:58 pm
That’s awesome work. Design looks great. Be excellent!
Tbone McScreedle
# July 3, 2008 - 6:02 pm
What a sad world our young hero Matt lives in – perpetually enduring life with his own personal rain cloud dampening his spirits. As least, he’s got both of his eyeballs, but then again he never really enjoyed an afternoon playing “running with scissors” with the other creatures. …btw, someone should tell that two headed fellow he has a gigantic tape worm crawling out of his bum.
it’s nice to see a site with personality :-)
Tracy Osborn
# July 3, 2008 - 6:15 pm
Your site designs are inspiring! Great job on the project.
Also, the cloud and bird background shows through the footer when you scroll down (FF3 Mac). Just wanted to let you know if that isn’t the intended behavior. :)
Michael Grinstead
# July 3, 2008 - 6:15 pm
Hopefully you’ve requested a twitter link for your app ;) http://twitter.com/help/request_source
Elliott
# July 3, 2008 - 6:16 pm
Hey, that’s not Matt! That’s Gobo!
Ryan Rumsey
# July 3, 2008 - 6:17 pm
Love the layout! Absolutely beautiful work. Love the CSS creating the three dimensional effect.
David Myers
# July 3, 2008 - 6:22 pm
Awesome website. I’m really liking the creative/free feel of the design!
Yay!
adelle
# July 3, 2008 - 6:26 pm
Great job guys! This is awesome and I love the little drawings. Keep up the amazing work – guess I will have to get one more twitter account now to make it useful. ;)
Scott Mallinson
# July 3, 2008 - 6:28 pm
A fantastic piece of work, you certainly didn’t disappoint and I loved the marketing tactic you employed to get the word out there – the power of social networking and web 2.0 applications.
Andrew Yates
# July 3, 2008 - 7:20 pm
Always fasinating to watch how these things develop over the 4 days. Being following it closely as I want to introduce something similar at work. Except it will be a 1 day a week for a month.
Already have multiple twitter accounts, so i’m going to find it useful.
Congrats on the launch. :)
Here’s to Matt! :)
Andy
Andrew
# July 3, 2008 - 7:53 pm
Congratulations on the launch and for the thrills along the, albeit short, journey. Great insight into the Carsonfied web factory – you’ve proved yourselves yet again!
Chuck
# July 3, 2008 - 7:56 pm
Nice looking site, although not as impressive as the Carsonified PR Machine though…
“We’ll be starting June 30th”
Not June 11th then;
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:lLp4xymT5jsJ:https://twitter.com/matt_test+site:+twitter+matt+alpha&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=uk&client=firefox-a
Matthewtennison
# July 3, 2008 - 8:07 pm
Cool service, but as others have said, any chance we’ll get to see our tweets on this page too? If I could both tweet and see my tweets, this would likely become my full-time twitter client.
Somewhat Frank
# July 3, 2008 - 8:42 pm
Twitter From Multiple Accounts With Matt…
Do you have multiple twitter accounts that you are constantly flipping back and forth between to post messages? I do. It is pretty annoying to keep having to logout and then log back in. The Carsonified team made it a challenge to help remedy this prob…
Mark Forrester
# July 3, 2008 - 9:01 pm
Super impressed with what you guys have put together in 4 days. The design is awesomely unique, I can’t say much for the functionality yet as i haven’t played around with it, and the marketing has been extremely viral!
What more could you ask for?
Michael
# July 3, 2008 - 10:23 pm
Looks really nice, great job for a four day app. My only gripe is that you should really put a privacy policy (or something similar) there…make it clear what happens with the twitter usernames and passwords that are submitted via the site. I’d love to try it, but I’m uncomfortable entering login credentials from one site into another, especially when there is no clarification or reassurance.
I’m sure you guys don’t / won’t do anything bad, but it would be a good idea (IMO) to clear that up, and patch a potential liability too :)
patrick h. lauke
# July 3, 2008 - 10:55 pm
looking very swish…the design looks awesome. two small points, from just looking at the homepage though:
- the login form’s label elements could do with a “for” attribute to explicitly tie them to the relevant input elements
- more fundamentally, why does your app request my twitter credentials, and in the clear? isn’t this an anti-pattern (don’t request username/password for another service…do some oauth/openid type stuff instead)?
prisca
# July 3, 2008 - 11:36 pm
just to say well done, carsonifieds :-)
really like the site and graphics – lovely visuals and a nice and friendly feel to it all. Hope you had a good evening celebrating :)
PS: my only problem is that I don’t really want a second twitter account :’(
Ryan
# July 4, 2008 - 12:07 am
Hey everybody – thanks for the super nice words. You’re awesome.
@Patrick – great points regarding the login form and oauth/openid questions. Maybe @elliottkember can respond to that?
Ryan
# July 4, 2008 - 12:09 am
@Chuck – Elliott built a very simplified copy of Matt using PHP (Symfony) before he started at Carsonified (to impress us, I reckon). We didn’t use a single line of his code for Matt though. Don’t worry – we’re not cheaters.
Barry
# July 4, 2008 - 3:41 am
Guys – congrats. Inspiring!
Saw you on Techcrunch. Care to comment more on Django and why you might not use it on future projects?
Jon
# July 4, 2008 - 8:46 am
The site looks great guys! Very refreshing design.
On my PC at work I have noticed that Matt is about 3 pixels too wide for a 1024px monitor.
Of course, it makes no difference to the page, but it means there is a horiz scroll bar taking up a bit of room at the bottom.
Other than that, I think I need to get myself a 2nd twitter account so that I can give it a trial run.
Jon
Adrian
# July 4, 2008 - 11:51 am
Nice app, Carsonipeeps! Congratulations. particularly impressive given the time constraints.
2 nits I would like to pick – fixing these would take 20 seconds and make this an A++ effort:
the XHTML doesn’t quite validate, almost but not quite -
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.themattinator.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0
and its not 1024 x 768 – instead its 10…30? by 768. I can’t see the D of Carsonified over on the right there. I have a personal loathing of horizontal scroll bars and i’m seeing one :-(
Mark H
# July 5, 2008 - 12:07 pm
Awesome site. Incredible idea,story, design !everything.!
My question is. Do other people, are the able to, see the tweets I am making on the matt page. I have one account that is private for work so just wondering. Thanks
Lisa
# July 5, 2008 - 1:20 pm
Well done everyone – it was greet to be there for the launch. One thing I think would be interesting for everyone is a blog post about what went wrong! Seriously, I don’t think this would be negative at all – especially as it was an experimental environment. One of the themes that regularly comes out of FOWA is that successful companies accept failure and even embrace it! Would be good to know lessons learnt in everything from planning to development and marketing.
Mike
# July 5, 2008 - 2:09 pm
Hey guys! I really like the idea of this whole exercise. Great way to run a company.
@Ryan Carson: Could you please elaborate a bit on why you would not choose Django again (and does this include Python)? You made a comment about this in your Techcrunch post. I am about to start a project with Django myself (and am also new to it and Python) and would otherwise do it with Symfony, so an explanation of your comment and the problems you’ve run into with Django(/Python?) would be very much appreciated. :)
Ryan
# July 5, 2008 - 11:17 pm
@Lisa – Great idea :) Thanks for coming to the launch, btw.
@Mike – Django doesn’t appear to force strict object oriented coding practices. For example, you can directly manipulate variables in a class, instead of using Getters and Setters. Symfony simply won’t let you do this (as I understand it). Elliott will be able to tell you more.
Elliott
# July 6, 2008 - 9:46 am
Hey all! Thanks for the great comments, we had a whole lot of fun building Matt! Thanks for all the comments and suggestions, we’ll look at them as soon as we get back to work! Feels like a well-deserved break if you ask me – what a week!
I’m writing a post about the week, in which I’ll give you the low-down from the developers’ point of view! Not only that, there might be even more awesome Matt week video to watch. Stay tuned :)
PS, @Mark H: No, your private tweets stay private.
Mike
# July 6, 2008 - 11:55 am
Thank you for your quick response. I’m looking forward to Elliott’s in-depth post about the week and Django’s shortcomings as you see them.
Paul Michael Smith
# July 7, 2008 - 2:04 pm
Nice work, especially considering the time you did it in.
I think this is total co-incidence each team’s part but I noticed how the design looks really similar to this site: http://www.the-rox.com/index.asp.. Like an online doppleganger. :P
Darren Ferguson
# July 7, 2008 - 3:37 pm
All I get from matt is
addLoadEvent is not defined
[Break on this error] addLoadEvent(function() {
and the error message ‘Hey, enter username and password!’ when i try to login!
Mike Kus
# July 7, 2008 - 4:09 pm
Hey Paul,
I’m Mike the designer at Carsonified.
There’s no co-incidence there. I designed both sites. It’s weird actually it was totally unintended… it just turned out that way.
What is weird is I designed that site about 6 months ago and it’s just started to surface on CSS design galleries now!….at the same time as Matt.
Thanks for pointing it out…. I wondered if anyone would see the link between them.
Mike :)
Josh
# July 8, 2008 - 5:06 pm
This looks quite handy, it’s actually something I have felt the need for before!
It’s a bit of an irritation that the site is just a little bit bigger than can fit on my 1024-pixels–wide screen resolution. We don’t all have massive widescreen monitors.
Matt Browne
# July 14, 2008 - 3:54 pm
Great job on ‘Matt’ guys. I really appreciate you building this tool. It was something I had been thinking about for a while, and it was nice to see your team execute it well.
Ryan
# July 15, 2008 - 5:29 am
@Matt Thanks for the kind words :)