The Office of Letters and Light Blog

A Technical Education

Three years, 2 months and 24 days ago, I came on board at OLL as the first employee to hold the title of Community Liaison. I had a writing and business background, but I was pretty weak on the technological know-how.

 Lucky for me, overseeing volunteers didn’t expressly require that I have great programming chops or anything. But it did require that, in my very first week, I learn some rudimentary HTML.

The first thing I created on the site was called The Best Page Ever, and featured photographs of a bearded man and a kitten, as well as a list of my favorite foods in descending order. (I aced the HTML portion of the test, but accidentally published the page, to the confusion of a few very vigilant Wrimos.)

Fast forward three years. The Best Page Ever is still stored in our database (though it’s now unpublished, thankfully). And we are pulling the curtains back on the second website I’ve ever helped create: the brand new Rails-built NaNoWriMo.org (the first being the Camp NaNoWriMo website, released this summer).

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Five Launch Lessons

Over the years, I’ve learned to enjoy NaNoWriMo site relaunches the way a winemaker might savor a fine vintage. It’s such a heady mix of flavors! There’s the bouquet of excitement, a slight grace note of terror, all undercut with a peppery finish of ripening HTML code.

This is the second year I’ve had the pleasure of watching relaunch from a distance, as the great NaNoWriMo Program Director Lindsey Grant worked with fearless tech lead Dan Duvall to oversee everything. Not being as directly involved in the process has given me a chance to reflect on all the lessons I’ve learned from site relaunches of years past. I would like to share some of those lessons with you now.

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