Hackers and Painters is on my list three times :)

I'm going to have to check out Cal Hendersons book sometime but first I have to make a good site then I can worry about scaling it.

Cal addresses that by arranging his book in roughly the order that you should think about things. He recommends that you think about:

1. Version control

2. Issue tracking

3. One-click deploy

4. Internationalization

5. Security

before you start building your application, then you build and release it, then (and only then) start thinking about:

6. Email

7. Web services

8. Scalability

9. Statistics & monitoring

10. APIs

This mostly squares with my experiences (both with my own startup - currently on step 3, with 4, 5 and a launch-ready app already done - and working for others). The only changes I'd make are:

1. Move statistics and monitoring up the priority list, before launch. You want that data available to drive feature implementation.

2. I'm of two minds on internationalization. I think that most apps can wait until they're popular before they need to internationalize. However, i18n is really difficult to do later, after you've already built an app. I watched LiveJournal go through the process, and it wasn't pretty. So even though you don't need it, you may want to do it upfront because it'll be much harder later.

Now I think I need this book. Your right about stats, I would move them to number 6 or perhaps even to prelaunch.

yeah shows how much I read. Hence why i like short lists. Take the time to also listen to CH on Carson Workshops [0] & this one [1]. Also check out the O'Reilly chapter from the book [2].

[0] Carson Workshops, 'The Future of Web Apps, carsonworkshops.com/summit, Cal Henderson'

http://media.libsyn.com/media/carsonsystems/Cal_Henderson.mp3

[1] Carson Workshops, 'Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget – How We Built Flickr, ~ 10Mb, 10 min.'

http://odeo.com/audio/1207043/view

[2] O'Reilly, 'O'Reilly, Building Scalable Web Sites, Cal Henderson. Chapter 5: Data Integrity and Security, ~ 5Mb'.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/web2apps/chapter/index.html

Ahh, if only google notebook would actually structure the data in a pretty way just like your numbered citations

the question is ... can you extract your data?

Then you can do with it, what you like! This is the bane of my existence and I want to own this problem!