Are you a new yorker?

Last night a friend of mine was watching "How I Met Your Mother" and decided after hearing about the rules to tell when you're a New Yorker that there needed to be a site dedicated to them.

I was then ordered to start doing the HTML while my friend did the back end with Google App Engine. It ended up finally getting me to relearn CSS and modern HTML (I hadn't done any web work since about 1998).

The timeline went a bit like this (All times PDT)

  6:15pm: SymKat watches the episode
  6:30pm: I get drafted to do the front end work even though I don't know what I'm doing, at this point we think an hour or two is a reasonable time frame for getting it done
  8:00pm: The HTML is in a usable state but doesn't look that good.  SymKat claims the back end is ready.
  8:20pm: I suggest some feature creep for the backend so that it doesn't look like I'm taking forever.  I struggle to the layout to look just right.
  9:15pm: Coding on the back end for rating things is done.
  9:45pm: Pagination on back end is coded and tested
  10:15pm: HTML and look is in a usable state.
  11:10pm: We discovered that neither of us knew anywhere near enough javascript to make the rater work right.  I begin looking at jquery tutorials.
  11:20pm: We scammed a few of our friends to try to help us, they looked but didn't produce anything.
  1:00am: I manage to finish the rating code.
  1:40am: We wait on the DNS to flush from our ISPs so that we can actually see the domain properly
  2:30am: More feature creep, hiding things that have a rating lower than -10.  GAE doesn't like this, if you use an inequality in a query you HAVE to order by it.  NO MATTER WHAT.
  2:35am: We just delete them instead.
  3:35am: Put a up caching proxy on it for the static content to speed things up. http://symkat.com/118/introducing-sympullcdn/
  4:20am: Final version pushed to GAE.

That took a hell of a lot longer than the original time frame, but we still got it deployed. You can check it out at http://www.notanewyorker.com/