Best Day In The Life Of A Project

Today was the best day in the life of a project I have been working on for about a year.

The project is about putting a huge book online: 75,000+ pages of text, 900+ maps in 105 volumes, narrating World War One from the point of view of the French military.

It’s a fantastic ressource that has been a little underused until now, mainly because of its sheer physical size.

I supervised the scanning and the conversion of text (only index and tables have been converted), and developped an application (Ajax) to search the index and read the pages.

The whole thing took a long time because there were many validation steps and tasks to coordinate, etc.

But today’s the best day!

Why? Because it went live!

Well, not really live as in “accessible on the Internet”, but “almost live”, as in “accessible on the military archives intranet — but without actually telling anyone” (the telling should happen in a few months).

This sounds bad but it isn’t, because live is live; even if almost no-one knows about it, some people do. Hey, even if just one person did, it would be enough.

Indeed, the answer to the question “how many users do you need to be happy” is: one.

Something that didn’t really exist is starting to take a life of its own; slowly, it’s crawling in the general direction of light.

I’m smiling.