Credits
This site wouldn't have been possible without the following great people, tools and open source software. Here's a big "thank you" to...
Screen West Midlands
We're based in Birmingham, in the West Midlands, UK. These guys are our regional 'screen agency' who have a fund for investing in digital media startups. Big thanks to them for showing their early financial support for the idea.
Open Advantage
Thanks to Anthony Ramm who's been the 'Rails Mentor' for Odadeo, dispensing sage advice almost on tap. Having an expert to guide you in the right direction is fantastic, and Open Advantage do this for free - helping UK businesses to use open source software. Cool.
Who's behind Odadeo?
Odadeo was built and launched as a 'far too early beta' over a three month period by me, Stef Lewandowski with the aid of strong coffee, a handful of books, Google, my very understanding family (thanks Emily) and a fair amount of patience, stress and inspiration in equal measure.
I run a small web consultancy called 3form in Birmingham, UK and Odadeo was an idea that I had when my daughter was born in late 2006. That first year isn't really a good time to be launching time-consuming new ideas, so I waited a while before building the site!
Since then Tom has joined as our community manager whose job is to make sure that everyone's requests, ideas, problems and suggestions are all responded to promptly and to help grow or small community of dads.
When was it announced?
We announced the site on Fathers' Day, 15th June 2008 fresh from returning from New York after picking up a Webby Award for one of our previous projects - the website for First Light Movies, who enable young people to make short films.
We called it the 'far too early beta' for good reason - we've only scratched the surface of what we want to do with the site, and there were still lots of bugs to iron out. But you can't move a deadline like Fathers' Day...
All of our beta testers
The biggest thanks go to the people who are helping us make this better. Every day we hear another great idea for something we should do - keep them coming!
Ruby on Rails
Odadeo was built from scratch as a first project using the Ruby on Rails framework.
Huge thanks to 37Signals for providing such a valuable tool to the web community. Check out their products - they're good and we use them to make developing this site easier: Basecamp, Highrise and Campfire.
The bloggers
Developing with Ruby on Rails is unlike any other language - changes happen so fast that the best way to find an example of what you're trying to do is to use Google and browse through all the fantastically useful blogs out there. Too numerous to namecheck here, but without them this site wouldn't have been anywhere near ready for our beta.
Lovd By Less
About half way through the project, someone said "Haven't you felt the urge to add some social networking features to the site?" so I sat down in the lobby of a hotel, while Emily was doing a wedding show upstairs, and discovered Lovd By Less - an open source 'starter pack' for doing profiles, messaging, and so on. It took a day to mash together a lot of its features with our own - a very complicated process but well worth it. Since then we've recoded most of the resulting site, but underneath the hood there are a number of things that still were originally developed by these guys. Thanks for open-sourcing your code - it made developing this happen significantly faster.
The plugins
Big thanks to the people who write and publish the plugins that we're using:
- Acts as Authenticated
- Acts as Favorite
- Akismet
- Country Codes
- Dr Nic's Rails Footnotes (amazing when developing with TextMate)
- Exception Notifier
- File Column
- Fiveruns (wow)
- Permalink_fu
- Shoulda (more wow for testing)
- White List
- Will Paginate
And gems
Some ridiculously useful pieces of software.
Jquery
A lot of the javascripty stuff that happens on this site is done using Jquery.
We use the Flot library for our graphs and the Rounded Corners library to keep our code looking neat and light on graphics.