It's a rake! It's a back scratcher! It's all-in-one!

So you have a rake. Part of a rake is a long stick. And so you think to yourself, hey, back scratchers have long sticks too! Let's put a mini "rake" on the other end of the actual rake and boffo!

The Snowball Begins
52 Clix hosts monthly photo walks in the San Francisco bay area. We're walking Land's End in San Francisco on Nov. 15th if you're interested. Anyway, we wanted to get the word out about the walk, so our first lame attempt was just to manually do everything. It was tedious. Moreso than it needed to be, particularly when this was going to be a regularly recurring event. The engineer in us wanted automation. And it wanted it now.

Over the course of a day, the input screens to put the photo walk on the site and the design of the consumer-facing page were completed. The image slicing and HTML/CSS the following. And then...

The Snowball Starts Taking Out Skiiers
When you build tools that only one person is using, you get this sense that the tool isn't fulfilling its full potential. And then suddenly it's like looking at the stick on a rake and saying, "hey, this could be a back scratcher too!" On one hand, you're right. The pocket knife is a great example of extending utility out of one tool. On the other hand, if the knife is a $200 blade made for dicing vegetables, adding a can opener, spoon and fork to it doesn't make much sense. Keeping focus on purpose is important.

So after spending time looking at the photo walk publishing tool we were building, the thought occurred to us to make the tool available to everyone. We could build an entire Events section! Members could post their own photo walks, gallery events in their area and more! How exciting! And we were off to the races on adding features like saving events, filtering events your friends were attending and nearly adding the latitude and longitude data mentioned in a previous blog post.

The Snowball Stops Rolling and Starts Melting in the Sun
The Events section was launched a little over a month ago. It instantly looked barren. It instantly became this needy creature on the site. We started hunting the Web for other photo events to add to our events section. We only did this for the bay area, because that's where we're familiar. It was hard. It was annoying. And worst of all, it was taking up space on our Web site with only tangential appeal to our core product. The problem was only compounded with our members coming from all over the US - what did Texans care about a book signing in San Jose, California? We didn't offer any regional filtering in the v1 release of Events.

In the end, the amount of time devoted to this just started to seem more and more silly. People aren't coming to our site to look for this weekend's hottest photo event. It was a focus away from the core product and in the next week, the Events section will be a distant memory. Never be afraid to take a scalpel to your product.