We have reached the final day of Matt Week, ahhhhhhhhh! The Carsonified office is buzzing with excitement. The aim of the day is to launch Matt by 5.30pm. Pre-launch drinks are starting at 5.00pm, hooray I think we all need a beer! I asked Keir if he thought Matt would be up and running by 5.30pm and was very confident it would be. Although when I asked Elliott he said "I'll tell you at 5.30".

Mike who has been glued to his chair all week, said things were going really well! But it is midday so anything could happen between now and 5.30pm. Tune into Matt at 5.30pm to see if we have done it.

Mean while Matts PR team have created a buzz over the waves with people twittering about Matt and also blogging. Ryan has got an interview with the local paper tomorrow, to tell his experince of this past week! We have also got onto Digg, with the awesome time lapse video :)

The tension is too much will we do it, I hope so!

Until 5.30pm - The Carsonified Team

Where has this week gone, eek!! We have hit the end of day three already. I must admit the atmosphere in the office today has been a lot less jokey and a bit more tense as everyone is working away like busy beavers.

Keir and Elliott were behind schedule from yesterday, but their aim for today was to create a live working dev version of Matt. How did they get with this huge task? They had not quite got there, but were very close. Keir was pleased at the progress and said "We have completed the functionality, intergrating templates and are now looking into schedule's for tweeting". When asked the struggles of the day keir replied, "form intergration were a problem due to the lack of Django knowledge". So it seemed a day of getting there heads down had paid off, welldone guys.

Mike was also a bit behind from yesterday, his task of the day was to produce finished templates for the site, and web app templates in HTML. Mike had actually almost achieved this and was very pleased with the results, which is fantastic. The biggest hold back for him was the lack of time to be creative with the whole project.

Matts PR team had made great progress with the local press getting them involved. Ryan is going to writing about this experince for TechCrunch tomorrow. A few peeps will be joining us for the launch. Brilliant!

All in all a very busy day, but the progress is great, after yesterdays set backs we have caughtup and it looks like Matt could launch on time, fingers and toes crossed.

Until tomorrow - The Carsonified team

Well we are nearing the end of day 2 for the Matt app.

So just how are the Carsonified team getting along with this 4 day challenge of building a web app?

Today Mike the designer was given the target to finish the home page and 1 application page. You'll be pleased to now he completed the home page for Matt, hooray for Mike! But he hasn't managed to complete 1 application page by today eek, but Mike said "I spent more time on the design than allocated for the home page, but I really feel it's worth it". But will it be worth it, if we do not finish the design by Thursday?

On the developer side Keir and Elliott were given the task of completing a working version of Matt. Have they completed their challenge of the day? No. But don't panic they are nearly there and are pretty confident that they will have a working version tomorrow! Go on boys! When I asked them the problems they encountered today Elliott said "There were issues with the setups, earlier today, but now we are making progress and tying up the last bits together".

With copy and Marketing everything is going swimmingly, although we are looking for some press to come along to the launch, we have sent out e-mails and made calls just awaiting to here back, fingers crossed.
Until tomorrow......Carsonified team :)

A great quote from Fast Company's interview with FriendFeed's Bret Taylor from a couple weeks back: "Natural word of mouth marketing only comes if you’re constantly improving your product, addressing people’s concerns, and getting real usage and feedback." I'd never thought about word of mouth being so connected to iterative development before, but it makes sense.

We’re currently looking for a really talented Editor/Publisher for ThinkVitamin.com

We are looking for a person who loves their words to look after Carsonified’s award winning Online magazine Vitamin.

The role requires you to commission brilliant writers, from around the globe. Edit copy. Manage the revenue. You would also have great input into the structure and content of the magazine.

Preferably you would have a passion for the web and a knowledge of web designers, developers and entrepreneurs.

This position is based in Carsonified’s HQ in beautiful Bath

If you would like to apply please send your CV’s to natasha at carsonified dot com, http://carsonified.com/jobs

Philip Guo on Why Python is a great language for teaching beginners in introductory programming classes.

Why Yelp Works. "Yelp understood that, as with Wikipedia, a small group of people can create something that the rest of us can take advantage of."

NETTUTS, a new site from the same group that does Freelance Switch and PSDTUTS, has a nice post up about its development and design called 7 Crucial Tips for Designing and Maintaining a Large Site.

Derek Sivers (owner/operator of CDBaby) covers cloud computing, Google's mailserver features, businesses not needing employees and more with his post Some things I’ve learned this year that turned my world upside-down and I’m still trying to wrap my head around.

Wake Up Later's The Evolution of Websites looks at how 10 sites — Apple, Amazon, etc. — have and haven't changed over the years.

AdAge's It's Web 3.0, and Someone Else's Content Is King is an interesting look on the "no reporting, all aggregating" trend that sites like Hacker News and TechMeme, as well as more focused efforts like EveryBlock, have obviously capitalized on in the past few years.

Lately have you found yourself looking for yet another reason not to use Windows Vista? Well, here you go.

A couple of competing points of view today with Five reasons why a recession is a good time to start a company and Matt Maroon's Why not to do a startup.

Join us in London and learn the secrets of giving your sites and web applications the rich interactivity they deserve. Our next one day workshop "Professional JavaScript and Ajax" by Thomas Fuchs, author of script.aculo.us and Rails core member, will provide real-world examples and practical knowledge to enable you to make the jump to using Ajax and JavaScript.

Find out more about the workshop on the Carson Workshops web site.

Carsonified is looking for a tremendously talented web designer who is passionate about Web Standards, accessibility, blogging and beautiful hand-coded CSS and XHTML (print design experience is also a bonus).

We work a 4-day week, give you 35 days holiday and give you great gear (iPhone, 23" Cinema Display, MacBook Pro and Aeron Chair). One of your first jobs will be do re-design Vitamin :) Please note that you'll need to work from our nice new office in Bath, UK.

You can apply today - move fast as the job will probably get filled quite quickly.

What better way to gear up for the week ahead then to look back at the week that was in new designs? Il Frutteto (click on a nav link, mmm, JQuery goodness), Griffin Technologies (a refreshingly constrained corporate site), Chyrp (YAWDCMSS: Yet Another Well Designed CMS Site), Deaxon (I believe it's what you'd call "polished"), Vineyard Vines (absolutely nails the white and blue beach aesthetic) and Impress Lab (paper and paper clips done well). 

It's almost weekend, and what better way to spend Saturday and Sunday than looking at the best new designs of the past week? NOFRKS (the day and night themes are a nice touch), Design Sponge (no sponges, but plenty of fabric background images), Protagonize (what a great name for a site about writing, looks nice too), TillyMoss (homemade MacBook covers stylishly presented) and Sideshow (clean site with a lovely blockup).

With the day winding down why not sit back for a few minutes and watch Gabe and Max's How To Get the Dreamlife of Your Dreams Using the Internet? Their 430 part system is the total system you need!

In case you missed it, Scott Shane's post over at Guy Kawasaki's blog earlier this month is full of interesting stuff. Like "[t]he typical start-up only requires about $25,000 to get going", "the odds that a start-up company will get VC money are about one in 4,000. That’s worse than the odds that you will die from a fall in the shower" and "[o]nly the top ten percent of entrepreneurs earn more money than employees."

A quick dump of the best new designs from late last year to this past week so we can get all caught up: SpinVox (Skype-esque, which is a compliment), Wishingline (great redesign by the Canucks at Wishingline), Lockerbie Square (gorgeous neighborhood site), Toggle design (simple and it works), Aaron Mentele (that's a nice blog) and pontual, raphael (a portfolio that starts at the bottom).

After four insane days for Carsonified Idea Week, we've built and launched Hugs, a set of 9 hand-crafted, limited edition MacBook and iPhone covers. They're free and you get to enjoy them and then pass them on :)

Slash Dot Dash's iPhone on Rails - Creating an iPhone optimised version of your Rails site using iUI and Rails 2 is a great, in-depth article on creating an iPhone friendly version of any Rails app. 

Here are a handful of last week's best new designs: Drew Wilson (love, love, love the abstract background), Tim Lahan (I like how his pocket is a quick visual summary of what he does), LuckyOliver (stock photos with a surprising style about it) and National Cottonseed Products Association (a lot going on, but I think they pulled it off).

UX Magazine's Investing in UX: "On November 1, 2006 we invested $50,000 of our company’s money into a fund consisting of 10 companies we felt did a great a job at user experience ... In the 365 days we owned our stocks the value of the portfolio increased 39.37%".