We are live! Mostly.

Wow, what a week. Very intense. I am tired, but happy!

The site is now live, but Heroku is failing to install proper ssl, so if you try to do anything secure (like log in) you will get an error page. That's fine, because I decided this weekend to turn off log-ins except for testers, since so much code changed in the last few days. Hopefully the next few days things will be properly tested and sorted out. I have come to terms in the last two weeks that the "launch" will be pretty "soft", and that I will be doing a fair bit of stuff behind the scenes in the next week or so to make sure that all functionality is properly in place.

Any errors or concerns or questions, please send them my way! I will be sending out the "tell your friends" email when things are a bit more locked down ... probably within 48 hours.

So how did we get here from one week ago? A LOT of work by me and Capacitr. Here's what was accomplished this week:

- nearly every page design was approved by me and turned into CSS, images, javascript, and HTML by Capacitr, then integrated into the site Rails code by me.
- turned on real live credit cards and user default payment method and shipping address. They are currently off on the live site so that we can test. This went much better than expected, though I ended up refactoring a big chunk of the order processing workflow.
- implemented recurring payments with secure credit card information storage with authorize.net
- created content for pretty much the whole site ... if it's human readable and on the site it was probably written by me in the past week
- created invoice processing
- implemented emails to users
- implemented customer tag management
- implemented and finalized all legal language for the site, including tracking user agreement to the rental agreement
- implemented an account summary that frankly looks pretty lame ... need to pretty that up, but it's functional
- started the process of label certification with Fedex. Was much more difficult than expected. Currently labels are still in test mode, but they look real.
- met with Dan Kamerling, who is now back from Ireland and ready to help. He is working on marketing stuff
- finalized orders for boxes, rubber stamps, bubble wrap, and tape. Going to rent a truck tomorrow to pick all of those up
- made equipment purchases, including scale, label printer, photography equipment, a sign for the outside of the processing location, and business cards (since the logo was finished at the very end of last week)
- got the keys to the processing location, the drywalling of which
- met with a charity-focused company to partner on donations (not live yet)
- met with a consignment store to partner on sales (not live yet)
- oh yeah, also attended Tech Week for a full day in downtown Chicago