Fairlight Works

Soft (re)launch

After an unexpectedly long period of development (I actually started on it this time last year), I’ve finally got the v2 Narrow Planet site to a state where I’m comfortable with letting people try it. So it’s online now at http://beta.narrowplanet.co.uk/ where it will remain for a week or so to bed in.

You’ll notice it now behaves more like a regular online shop, with ‘products’ that can nevertheless still be configured in various scales and with whatever customised text you want. The logic to make all that work made my brain hurt. Payment and final confirmation is still done offline, for the time being.

There’s an awful lot more I still want to do with it including automating more of the process, but for now I need to get back to the important business of drawing and making the things. At least there is now a solid(ish) platform to build on.

For those interested in such things, the new site runs on Node.js (a fast, efficient webserver based on Javascript) with the Express application framework and Jade templating generating what you see on screen, connected to a MongoDB document database. It’s quite unlike anything I’ve built before and has been an interesting learning process!

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