Hard-fought victories, but the war is not yet won

I told myself I was not going to blog until I had accomplished a major task today. I just got Fedex label service to start printing multiple customized messages on the label. That doesn't sound like much, but it was actually incredibly difficult to figure out, and in the process I learned a lot about debugging in Ruby. I should really create a few highly technical posts out there about some of the challenges I've faced with soap4r, Ruby 1.9, and the Fedex w9 interface. Man, who'd have thought that would be that difficult?

Lots of progress has been made, but the list of things remaining before the big launch date is still long. Here's what has to happen by a week from today in order for me to launch:

1. Get insurance that provides liability for me for people's stuff. Granted, my rental agreement will say that anything placed in storage is at the risk of the user, the user should make sure that they have homeowner's insurance that covers items in storage, etc, but at the end of the day I need this. I have found an insurance broker that specializes in internet firms and consignment companies, which is great. He is working on this for me. I have also found an insurance company that is willing to provide liability insurance that won't cover goods under storage, so that's not worth all that much. I'll be calling this broker tomorrow. Very nervous about this.
2. Get the legal paperwork back from my lawyer. He has it; I will call him tomorrow. Not too nervous about this.
3. Figure out pricing based (in part) on survey responses. I do not have as many survey responses as I need. Take the survey! http://bit.ly/qQ7goz.
4. Integrate all of the wonderful designs I have received from my designer into the site. This requires that he deliver them to me in CSS and HTML, right quick. Hopefully that will happen tomorrow. Somewhat nervous about this.
5. Upgrade to Fedex "production" shipping. This should be straightforward; we shall see. I will call them Monday. Somewhat nervous about this.
6. Get a label printer. Fedex said that they should be able to help me with this and said they'd call me this past week, but they never did. I will call them tomorrow, and if they do not help right quick I will buy one from a third party. Pretty nervous about this, but as a back-up I can use a regular printer, so not the end of the world.
7. Get my boxes and shipping materials. This is mostly done, just waiting on the box design from Capacitr. They said it would be "no problem". Also, I found out that it's going to rather difficult to ship these shipping supplies to me (meta!), so I will rent a truck and drive out to Lombard to get this stuff. Should be fun. Yay Chicago being a major shipping destination.
8. Upgrade to "real" credit card processing. The app is in, and this should be relatively easy, just waiting on Chase to handle this. Quite nervous about that one - banks are not to be trusted.
9. Finish a bunch of "clean up" site functionality. This stuff is supposed to be easy, but the 15 hours I just spent on Fedex integration is a warning that surprises happen. Rather nervous about this.
10. Turn on real SSL for the live site. This will probably eat up a disproportionately large amount of my time, but it's gotta be done.

That's it! Yikes.

But wait! I did in fact accomplish a lot this week. Here's a breakdown:

- attended Tech Week! Well, one day of it, so far. I plan to attend one more day tomorrow. It was fun, but tiring to pitch literally all day. I did make some fantastic connections, though.

- found the aforementioned insurance broker. That was a win.

- set up an appointment to talk to an upscale consignment store about partnering

- secured (mostly) my brother to come out to help me out with running the warehouse if necessary when I will be in Mexico at the beginning of September.

- GOT THE LOGO! It took a while, but this was a major coup. 

- Got a whole bunch of page designs from Capacitr. These are still in eps format, but it's good that we finalized how things are going to look. I think they look good!

- I cannot stress enough how much the fedex integration was a win. Getting that to work was incredibly difficult, but I managed to pull it off. I realized by talking to Fedex on Monday that just linking to their webpage to get the label wasn't going to cut it, because then I would lose the tracking number, which pretty well sucks. So on Monday I found an alternative soap4r that is compatible with Ruby 1.9 and is hosted on rubygems (score!) so it would work on Heroku, then last night and this morning figured out (a) how to save it to Amazon S3 (thought I would use Paperclip, a Rails plug-in, but that turned out to be a bad idea), and (b) how to print out custom information (like "Check here to inventory") on the label. Now it just works. Hallelujah! Amazon S3 is awesome, btw.

- Got off of Northwestern email and calendar completely. This was a surprisingly large pain in the butt with godaddy.com, but it's done, and now I can check email on my iphone, which I was not able to do up until that point. Plus Northwestern had stopped allowing me to create new calendar entries, so this was pretty much a must-have.

- built role-based security into the site so that people can't see one another's information. That was a bit time-consuming but not too difficult.

- built ssl into the site so that all transactions that need to be secure are secure (surprisingly difficult, and will be annoying when I go live)

- wrote a whole bunch of content for the site, including most of the legal and basic instructions. Still need to do faq.

- Integrated a perty new side navigation for account maintenance (designed and delivered by Capacitr)

One more item of craziness this week: I use a Belkin router on Comcast internet, so naturally I lose internet about a dozen times a day. Fine, whatever, rebooting the Belkin usually does the trick.

But this week, instead of showing "page not found" messages, my Mac started loading up localhost:3000 whenever I hit any page and that page was not available! What the? I don't even....

Happens in Chrome and Safari, and after system reboot. Other computers of course don't see this, but can't connect to internet until I reboot the router. Sometimes the reboot doesn't break my mac of its habit, and I have to just wait. Freaking bizarre. Macintoshes -- usually don't break, but when they do, watch out.