mental string

synapse

Monday, September 29th

gps
office - on my last week around here

working on
cooling down after a extra spicy pasta a la arrabiata

fuel
caffeine

Ben Harper – By My Side
Ben Harper – Power of the Gospel
Belle and Sebastian – Women's Realm
Caetano Veloso – Leaozinho
Beck – Que Onda Guero

latest finding
need to focus more

dreaming about
postcard 1,500,000

pet projects
shanghai 'work at jelly' meetups
zend certification done!
postcrossing


watching
not much. and now our tv is reduced from 50 to less than 10 channels. need to get my hands on in bruges

reading
getting real by 37signals
designing for the social web by joshua porter


alive and kicking… sort of

It’s been almost two months since my last post around here. Two months since I’ve launched postcrossing, two months since my concept of free time has been redefined, two months since my life changed a lot. Not just due to postcrossing, but about that, I’ll write on the next posts.

Postcrossing status? What else can I say, it’s a success - much bigger than I ever expected. If someone two months ago would have told me that it would reach where it is now this quick, I would have laugh at it. But now, things got too serious to be laughing about it.

Initially, I only had set two objectives for postcrossing:

  • to expand it to more countries than the initial small set;
  • and that the total of received postcards would be bigger than the registered users;

Seventy two countries and seven weeks later, I’m up to much more serious objectives and demands now. What was just a personal project turned into a worldwide community of users who share common interests and are connected not just by 0’s and 1’s but by something more.

I can tell you this much: time does not expand. I tried, I failed, repeatedly. I really wish I had more free time to work on postcrossing but I don’t - my internship is still two months to go and a huge bunch of my free time has been to postcrossing alone. But… I must be honest on this - it’s been such a delight to make things work this far, that I’m not abandoning this project any time soon, that’s for sure. I cuddled this idea for so long and now that it has born and is growing so damn well, I just hope I can keep it straight and on the right path for a long time. So many ideas, so little time to implement them…

My lil'serverFinding a new hosting for the website is a priority for the moment has the current solution will eventually be scarce for such amount of hits. This might be a surprise for some, but the server where 2800 users have registered is located in a small storage room in my home, just next to the kitchen door :). It has been doing an excellent job so far, but it’s time to start thinking on a more stable solution, specially because my internet link isn’t appropriate for this anymore. What this implies is that I’ll need to find a way to support the project financially and that’s where the tricky part comes. Let’s see how things go in the next weeks. Please let me know if you are interested in supporting the project.

Note: don’t expect to find on this blog more posts like this one about postcrossing. From now on, I’ll keep postcrossing subjects to a minimum. I always aimed on this blog to keep my geek side apart and I intend to keep it that way.


posted by paulo @ Sep 6th, 2005 - 02:40am
14 brain waves