One of These Days I Gotta Get Myself Organizized

So James and I were talking the other day about the need for some kind of formal defect/enhancement tracking, and it was all abstract and "wouldn't it be nice"-ish. Then in the shower this morning I had 6.8 million ideas and nowhere to put them, and I realized there was no way I would ever be able to hold them all in my head, let alone prioritize them, and all the sudden the walls were closing in and next thing I knew I was curled up in a little ball on the floor sobbing softly to myself...

So I think we need to accelerate our plans in this department...

I suppose if we really want to be all Web 2.0-y, we could use the free version of Basecamp (allegedly perfect for people with 1 project). We don't really need file sharing, since any files we're sharing ought to be in SVN anyway, but Bugzilla is probably more appropriate. This just in -- Drake says Bugzilla is a nightmare, so I guess we're back to square one. Suggestions are more than welcome.

Anyway since we don't have a better space right now, a few strategic initiatives:

• The central stumbling block to the Dr. Lunch experience (IMHO) is the effort involved in starting things up. You have to create a user account, create a group account, invite other people to join your group (all of whom have to create user accounts), then everyone adds restaurants, then you get to the "fun" part. I started to try to address this issue with the concept of "public" groups which allow outsiders (presumably outsiders new to Dr. Lunch) to request invitations to the group. Not only do you not have to create a group in this case, you don't even have to have any friends. I really like this, particularly the social aspect of it all, but I think we need to pursue simplification further. "Group-less" searches were one of the things I came up with -- if we had a zip code from a user, we could use average restaurant ratings to suggest some place nearby (also would be great for Dr. Lunch users on the road). Drake is a big fan of pulling restaurants from some sort of external source to eliminate the need to type things in (and maybe find some places users didn't know about before), and I definitely think we should be incorporating this. Finally, we need to make signing in and starting up a group seem simpler. More like a single step.
• Clearly Dr. Lunch was Web 2.0-ish before Web 2.0 was even called Web 2.0 (I'd like to remind new readers that my tongue is always at least 3/4 in cheek when I use the term Web 2.0), we let users control their data from the start. Users create and rate restaurants, add styles, etc. One thing we missed tho' is the whole concept of "Tagging," which I think has real applications here. My initial thought is that we take all the style data we have in our database right now and turn it into "tags". Then we let people add all sorts of non-style related tags. So instead of having an "Italian" restaurant, you'd have an "Italian" "Fast" "Expensive" restaurant and an "Italian" "Slow" "Cheap" restaurant. This kind of information would allow us to provide much better choices -- obviously some days you need a quick lunch, and Dr. Lunch should be able to adapt to those days.
• We're getting some near duplicate restaurants and styles. Like "Rudys BBQ", "Rudys" and "Rudys Country Store & Bar-B-Q" (all in Austin). This is a problem when we're trying to display a list of nearby restaurants. I don't know how to solve it, but I know we can't be the only ones with this issue. Suggestions?

And a few tactical issues:

• I need to make tables that page -- searching for nearby restaurants in some zip codes provides ridiculously long lists, they should fit on a page if they're going to be manageable.
• We have email addresses for our users, once a decision has been made, we should let people email it to everyone else who is going to lunch, along with a meeting place and a time.
• We need more flexible distances when searching for nearby restaurants. 5 miles is a long way in urban settings.
  

Ok, I feel a little better now...

Tightness in my chest is slowly loosening...

But if we don't figure out a better place to put these things than on our blog, I know it's just going to come back...