So I’m currently a week and a bit into three weeks annual leave, and I’m trying really hard to get Hahlo4 as close to finished as I can before I return to work. Part of the process in getting ready for version 4 is to redo the ‘info’ pages about Hahlo which are currently buried over on deanjrobinson.com (here).

As I’ve been working on H4 I’ve been posting small updates here and there to the hahlo twitter account in addition to the auto-posted SVN commit and bug/feature tickets that get posted in the hahlo_dev twitter account. But sometimes 140 characters just isn’t enough.

Last night I decided a dead simple WordPress install just for Hahlo would solve both problems in one go. Up early this morning (awaiting the delivery of my newly purchased Digital SLR…still waiting) I got started, and by lunch time I was pretty happy with what I had. A couple of hours after lunch cleaning up the details, and checking things in Firefox and Safari (if you’re using IE and there is a problem I don’t want to hear it) and it was ready to go.

Is the beta still running?

Yes, and based on my Google Analytics it looks like its getting a reasonable work out. I didn’t get flooded with nearly as many bug reports as I was expecting, especially given how ‘broken’ some sections were when I originally sent out the invites. I haven’t sent out any invites for a few weeks, and I know there a few people who’ve requested them, still unsure if I’ll need to send out more before it goes live. Will have to wait and see.

How long ’til Hahlo4 goes live?

Well ideally it would have gone live months ago, April was my original target, but that was shot out of the sky due to time needed on other “projects”. If, and it’s a big if, I can get everything sorted out in the next couple of weeks while I’m on leave it might go live late this month or early September. To be honest, and those testing it should hopefully agree, its pretty close, the main thing left is to ‘polish’ it up.

In the lead up to its launch, which I’ll announce here on this blog (that’s what its for right?), I’ll post some more about the new features you can find in Hahlo4, and I may even ask for some input in making some of the final decisions like I did last week on twitter in relation to whether I should put the username above the tweet on inline – the pieces of feedback I received were very helpful, thanks.

Right, I’ll stop now, I should go back to working on the webapp itself I guess.