Progress

Got signed up with GitHub, and moving all of my dev stuff into the cloud.

gamejam

So, gamejam distracted me (http://gamejam.org).But I'm back, and the plans now include

• Using GitHub to host the project
• Using UserVoice to get feedback

Ace!

l10n

I've been doing some work getting a PHP backend to be multilingual (in the sense that you can type to it in any language and it all just works) and international (in the sense that different versions will be available for different languages). Getting this working properly is tricky, yet essential, which goes some way to explaining why I've not posted recently.

Cloud

I needed to track what I'm spending, so I created an expenses spreadsheet using Zoho. So now I have a forum, a blog, the site itself, version control and my documents all "in the cloud". Amazing - no need to have a dedicated project machine anymore - any computer with a web browser can give me access to everything.

Server

I've managed to launch a server on EC2 and ssh into it. The next steps appear to be:

• Create (bundle) my own machine image (AMI) that is configured how I like it
• Create and then mount persistent storage (EBS)
• Put my changes into hosted SVN somewhere

Baby steps.

ElasticFox

So I've registered for EC2, installed ElasticFox and started tinkering around. It'll take a few sessions to get to the point where I understand what's going on, and to get things working. I've also realised that I can save my budget by creating my "Coming Soon" page at GoDaddy, to avoid me having to run my EC2 instance all the time. Right now, the next steps are:

• Continue tinkering with ElasticFox until I've got the basic framework up and running
• Create a coming soon page at GoDaddy
• Get a professional logo, and add it to the coming soon page, the blog and the forum
• Start work on the back end and the front end, switching between the two as I desire

I registered a forum at Nabble, and I expect that the coming soon page will link to the forum and the blog, and contain various copyright notices and whatnot. Excitement!

Hosting

I checked out Amazon's EC2, and it looks kinda cool. I don't anticipate MegaHAL10 to be massively popular, so I'd expect to be able to run it on a single server, but I like the idea of anticipating the scaling problem, so EC2 is a good candidate. Cost should be around $120 per month, given the current exchange rate. This is to have a "Small Instance" up for the entire month, and allows for a lot of data transfer; at least 10MB per day in and 100MB per day out. That might not sound like alot, but it fits my projected numbers, and multiplying the data by a factor of ten will only add about $10 per month to the bill anyway. This means, given my budget, I can fund six months before I'll need money coming in to help pay for things, which is less than my $1000 / one year mentioned yesterday.

I also need SVN hosting (I'd prefer Perforce, but can't find any hosting options for that, and I don't want to run my own server). beanstalk offer free SVN hosting, so I think I'll go with that.

Google's App Engine looks interesting, but is currently restricted to Python. Although that would suit a lot of projects I've got on the backburner, my intention with MH10 is to develop a stand-alone client, and C++ is a better option for me in that case.

Finally, I need a funky logo, so I plan to ask an artistic friend of mine to knock up a suitably Web2.0 logo, and the remainder of my budget will go on that. So the plan is to get a professional looking "coming soon" page up-and-running on EC2 under the megahal10.com domain as soon as possible. Once that's there, I'll be able to work both top-down (i.e. flesh out the web front-end) or bottom-up (the back-end), and it'll be nice to have the flexibility to switch between these two tasks as my mood dictates.

Registered!

My budget is now a measly $945, and megahal10.com has been registered until 2013. It's just parked at GoDaddy for the time being, but hopefully it won't be too long until I get this thing hosted somewhere or other.