Yeah. It's a form, of course, of hierarchy. Higher-ark-ick-al. :)

Hey guys wanted to say outstanding show. You really did one for the GEEKS this time!

I gave you a Digg as well. Hopefully you guys will get some blessings from that.

Also, yes mollom.com is amazing. Congrats on the recognition from Dries to have you do that.

There are a lot of differences between the 2 projects to take into account.

One is that the Muddy River site had several new modules built for it and there was a bit of crazy custom theming. Getting the details for, writing, testing, and launching new modules takes a little bit of time. Mustardseed didn't involve this part of the process.

Another part is content. There is a lot more on the Muddy River site. It takes longer to load it, test it, check it, and tweak it.

Complexity is another thing. The Mustardseed site is much less complex on many levels than the Muddy River site. On the Mustardseed site there is no fancy rotating banner, there is no video that starts as an image but changes to a video when you click the images, and dozens of taxonomies to display on the media types.

Does this start to make sense? This really has to do with the complexity difference between the two projects.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

I would add this as well... while it may have felt like 3 months for Rob, to be dealing with us, it was more like 2 months. :-) We signed the agreement on January 28 and was beta testing by the end of March.

Also, there were times when Rob would have to wait for us to make decisions on issues, or provide necessary materials for a next step. That wouldn't be an issue while working on his own site.

Mark Fogarty
www.MuddyRiverMedia.org

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Get Muddy... It's Free!
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hey kswan....
I have to say this is the best question I've heard in a long time. Indeed, what was the huge time difference??

Matt gave you a few, but in my estimation, these weren't the most important differences that took the greatest amount of time. I struggle myself with this question often...why do some sites take so much longer than others? I laid out some of the ideas here in an article written this week. You can read it here

But, here's 6 ideas of why the time difference was so big:

1. Freedom. The biggest and most sweeping difference between MuddyRiver and Mustardseed was freedom to develop what I thought best. Now, this (or anything following) is not a slam on MuddyRiver. It's just the reality of working with a client.

   You see, when I work with a client, I spend LOTS of that time making sure

   • I understand their vision, including design and functionality
   • I carefully explain the reasons I'm doing things so they fully understand the project

   These two things take alot of time. I can't just do what I want without their input and without explaining WHY I did things. With Mustardseed, that was the difference. I was the client and the developer...there was no communication needed.

   I would venture to say that if a client came to me and said "I trust you 100% and will not question your decisions" I could have built 95% of MuddyRiver Media's site (or a simliar site) in 9 hours.

2. Design Time. Tying into the one above, I had to come up with a design that was acceptable to the client and that I was happy with. This process takes a while. However, when it's my own project, I can do something I like, often in a matter of minutes.
3. Custom stuff. Yeah, we had a bunch of custom modules. However, I won't even suggest that building these took a ton of time. MUCH of this time was deciding that they were needed, how they should function, and clarifying specifics. Again, communication is what took all the time here. Actually building these modules took under 20 hours total (could have been done in 2-3 days) not to mention they were developed by additional developers, so that was 'simultaneous development' time....meaning (so far) that the site could have been developed in about 20 hours total
4. Content Addition. Sure, this took some time...but I think Mark will attest that it didn't take that much time. He probably could have added all this media in one day or a little more
5. Complexity. There was some complexity that needed to be worked out to the MuddyRiver functionality that Mustardseed's site didn't have. Deciding how taxonomy should work, doing slightly more complex styling, determining registration workflow, etc. This all takes some time
6. Bug Testing. Muddy River included a couple weeks of bug testing. Mustardseed's bug testing consisted of me firing up IE6&7, Firefox and Safari for a check. So, big difference here.

You also ask a great question: "3 months at 40 hours per week?" Not even close. Just for fun I figured what, at that amount of time, this Muddy River site would have cost him....it would have been 6X what it actually cost :)

No, alot of this time is 'waiting time'. The client is waiting for me to develop, then I'm waiting to hear back on decisions, budgets, design comps, etc. The actual hands on development time (for all developers total) was in the ballpark of about 80 hours.

The problem is, we look at that and go "Ok, so this really only took 80 hours..not 3 months." No. It took 3 months. You have to look into 'real time' numbers (which includes more human factors than just hands on development time) in order to plan a timeline for a project.

I think what you point out here is a HUGE issue. It's one that, if I had total trust (from the get-go) of my clients (which I don't blame them...I mean, it's not like I'm their pastor or someone else who is on the inside of their ministry) I could develop these sites about 10x faster, and probably 10x cheaper than I do. But the reality of people is: that's not the way it works....so things take much longer than we'd hope.

-Rob Feature
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.mustardseedmedia.com

You'll have to know Drupal if you listen to Geeks and God - Matt & Bob love to talk about it!
Yep, it basically is a web framework. Check out www.drupal.org or The G&G Series on Drupal sites: http://geeksandgod.com/podcast...

Enjoy ANZAC Day to all the Aussies and Kiwis here!
Lest We Forget.

Paul Vaartjes
www.paulvaartjes.com
www.cursoryglance.wordpress.com

Hi Matt - (apologies in advance... long post!)

I have read your blog entry on preloading images with jquery, but I am missing something in my understanding. I am still just learning this stuff, so it's all "baby steps" for me.

I'm trying to work out where and how I should apply the jquery pre-loading logic for images.

Over at www.lifesourcetv.com I have managed to implement rotating images in the banner, with smooth crossfades, using the "jcycle" plugin. Here's what I have done...

First, in template.php, I have the following lines:

The first line adds the jquery "jcycle" script to the head of every page, and the second line adds my external script file to every page, which does the actual rotation. Here's the contents of that script file:

This script finds the "bpic" id on the page, and applies the script to it. My banner block consists of a bunch of images, contained in a single div with an id=bpic. Here's the actual contents of the banner block:

OK, this works fine, and we randomly crossfade between each of the 5 banner images. At the moment, I am using just 5 images, and they all get loaded. Only the first one gets displayed initially, in case the user has javascript turned off, otherwise they would see all the images!

To keep the page load time down, I have built these images at lower resolution, and they are typically only about 30k in size.

I am wanting to:

• use much higher resolution images (larger file size; maybe 200k each?) and only load them as needed.
• have a much larger list of images to cycle through

but I don't want to have to wait all day while the page actually loads!

Is this what the jquery preload logic is all about? I guess I'm having trouble understanding how it all fits.

In your blog post you have two code snippets for preloading images... the first defines the "jQuery.preloadImages" function itself, and the second snippet is an example - "$.preloadImages("image1.gif", "/path/to/image2.png", ...".

Where do I physically put these code snippets? into a script file or into the block content? Can I integrate this preloading technique with what I have already done above?

This will be a huge key for me if I can get this to work... again, sorry for the really long post. I hope it makes sense and you are able to explain this to me!

Cheers & thanks
Pete