Bet Your Rep - Idea To Launch

Sunday night, I had this idea.  I was off to play some golf on Monday afternoon, and I thought it might be fun to let folks wager on what I might shoot for the day.  I grabbed my Moleskine and started sketching something out.

Before long, I had a simple layout needing a simple backend.  I hopped out of bed, grabbed a copy of CodeIgniter and set to work.  There were a couple of areas to consider.  The obvious front-end display and gathering of data, but also I had to build a way to update this from my iPhone while I was on the course as well as a way to disable the betting from my iPhone since I figured I’d be hitting a bucket of balls before the tee-time and I wouldn’t be near a computer to make the switch from betting to score tracking.  About an hour and a half later I had a functioning version of the site, but it was pretty bare bones design wise.  I decide to go to bed and finish in the morning.

Wake up early Monday and fire up Photoshop.  Mockup, slice up, XHTML/CSS up a design and hook it into the previous nights code.

Here is a screen of what the admin looked like that I used to add my scores as the game went along.  The first dropdown toggled whether or not the Sign-Up area was visible.  When set to OFF it replaced the signup code with the code that showed my score.  The second row of drop downs was for the actually scoring.  The first option selected the hole I was on, the second my score for that hole.  Really simple, but effective.

So I post it on Twitter and within a few hours we have a good hand full of gamblers! I was  hoping to pull in the Twitter library for CodeIgniter by Simon Maddox, but I just ran out of time.  It would have taken the Twitter usernames and converted them to the fullname plus the users Twitter icon.  Maybe next time.

I ended up hitting an atypical 81.  Two folks guessed 81, @kchohensee and @rich_kirk and will be receiving a free Twitshirt.

Overall is was quite rewarding to go from idea to launch and then useless all within a 24 hour period.  Thanks to everyone who participated!