The Trixie Update

The Trixie Update is soon coming to an end. It has been a three-year labor of love, and we’ve enjoyed sharing a special part of our life with the world. However, Trixie is only getting older, and I feel more and more protective of her (and my family) as she has grown from a human baby into a fully formed independent being. There will probably be a few more pictures coming, some of Trixie, some not, but I’m not making any promises about updating the site, or what the site may become. On a side note, we’re not pregnant and we haven’t been on vacation. Sometimes things just come to an end without much fanfare.

Update: Monday 9/11/06 10:00pm
Here’s a few more notes:
1) I’m not taking the site down. The archives will be up indefinitely.
2) I’m keeping the domain name too. When she wants it, I’ll give it to her. Check back in 5-10 years. It will be Trixie’s own blog then 3) Thanks to everyone for all the heartfelt comments. It really means a lot.

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I’m so exhausted after the non-stop birthday celebration that The Trixie Update is taking a little break this week. We’ll be back on Monday.

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Have an opinion about baby tracking software? Come voice it in the non-scientific, button marketing focus group over on the Trixie Tracker support forums. Thanks!

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I thought I would be writing more Trixie stories after we launched Trixie Tracker ( http://www.trixietracker.com ), but things don’t always turn out the way you expect. In fact, marketing Trixie Tracker is much, much harder than I expected, and there’s not time for much else.

I’ve learned that creating a new business and and introducing a completely new type of service is no cake walk. The design of the software was the fun, creative part. This is the nitty gritty part. I have to let new parents know that Trixie Tracker exists, and show them that it’s an insanely helpful and cool new way to understand their baby’s daily patterns and needs.

I’d appreciate your help in getting the word out. Can you recommend the site to family, friends and co-workers? Or are you an active participant on a parent’s message board or forum? Encourage folks to come try out the free trial. Thanks in advance everyone!

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Two things I’ve learned in the 23 months since starting Trixie Telemetry LLC (in April of 2004):

1. It’s really hard to do anything else when you’re taking care of a baby/child/toddler
2. I’m extremely bad at estimating launch dates

For almost the first year of the company, I was still taking care of Trixie all the time. That’s when the real progress was made. I could reliably count on writing about 3 or 4 lines of code a week. Extrapolating this work schedule would mean completion of the software some time after Trixie finished college, got married, lived in the Bronx for a couple of years, moved back down to NC, and then had a kid of her own. Add a few more months, say when the kid was 10-11 months old, and then the beta would probably be ready. Probably.

Instead of projecting a launch date in late 2020’s, I clung to the following rather optimistic estimates:

Actual launch March 8, 2006

Some of these launch dates were public, some internal. I stopped projecting after February, which is really too bad because it was fairly close at that point.

Things started moving a little faster after Trixie started part-time, morning school in Feb 2005 (at 18 months old). We launched the Beta two months later in April. I loved the concept of working on the Beta. It’s a constant design-in-progress with real time feedback as soon as you roll out new features.

That’s about the time that stories stopped here on the Trixie Update. It was just too much to juggle, and the dirty little secret is that I was managing another blog — the company beta blog — which racked up hundreds of stories and thousands of comments on its own. I couldn’t do both, so TTU took a hit.

By summer we had moved Trixie up to three-quarter time at school, and things started moving much faster again. Fast enough to fuel more wildly inaccurate launched date estimates. It was at this point that Jenn took a somber tone about the whole project. I acknowledged her tone and solemnly promised we would launch in November.

I’ll spare the excruciating details of the dark months of November and December. But January was a new month in a new year. An excellent developer (James) came on board the project, and started cranking out the missing code we needed to launch. He knocked out a permission based user management and public/guest access scheme which allowed our beta testers to finally share their sites with their friends and family. We wrapped up all the loose ends the next 2 months and finally launched last week.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing (and catch up on sleep). I’ve been working on this thing for so long, it’s hard to come down off the programming high. I’ve also been extremely irresponsible in my personal correspondence. I have a stack of letters and emails that date back to last summer. I kept putting things off because I always thought I’d be launching in the next month. I’m going to be working on all that stuff now, but if you emailed/wrote me and didn’t hear back, that’s why.

Thanks to you folks that still visit. I really appreciate it. Even though I wasn’t writing stories, I did feel pressure (good pressure) to do the TPODs. I’m glad I did, because I like looking back on the picture record. And there were times when I was ready to drop the TPODS too because they take about 5-10 minutes to prep every night. And sometimes 5-10 minutes seems like too much time.

Anyway, I think the Trixie Update is back. Thanks for sticking around!

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1) If I were as cool as Greg at daddytypes, I would have set up a database of baby-friendly bathrooms for the Triangle area the same way he has NYC covered. And if I had such a list, I would note how I flipped down the baby changing table at the New Hope Commons Barnes & Noble and Playboy’s College Girls spilled out. That’s disgusting — who’s going to want to buy a magazine after it’s been on a changing table?

2) Why were we at the book store? Because we’re popular! Popular Science, that is. We’re mentioned in an article about setting up your own blog, and they like our telemetry and metrics. Thanks PS!

Interesting side note: this is the first issue of PS I have ever seen that doesn’t feature some kind of flying car on the cover.

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I’m sure everyone has noticed the lack of new stories. I’m having a hard time juggling all things Trixie — the child, the blog, the software — and since Trixie can’t be left to her own devices, the Trixie Update has. This isn’t permanent. I hope to get more stories up soon, but there might be a couple more dry weeks as I deal with www.trixietracker.com.

For sure Trixie is doing plenty of entertaining things. Language is the primary distraction. She’s babbling worlds. Words like Moh!! (No) Buckshul!! (Buckle) and Heussse (Juice). We have conversations now: “Trixie, what did you have for lunch?” “BAY-BEES!!” “What do you want for dinner?” “Katttzz!”

The TPODs aren’t going anywhere. I’ll still have a new one up five days a week. They should be good ones, especially now that Trixie is helping out with the images.

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In case you missed it, the site was unavailable for a couple of hours as we upgraded to a better, (seemingly faster), more secure installation of Movable Type. We are back and everything seems to be running smoothly. If you find any bugs or unexpected behavior, please let me know. Who’s going to test out comments first?

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It sounds like I broke something in the page layout when I was ‘fixing’ the site this week. A couple of people have now told me the alignment is off on the top story. I’m trying to fix it, but in the meantime, any extra details are welcome. thanks-

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We just swung from one end of the attention span to the other with a mention in the New York Times. Welcome! I like to point all new visitors to Trixie Update 101. It’s an overview of the site that includes, among other things, links to some of the better telemetry-based charts and graphs. Thanks for visiting!

*One small correction to the article. My last name is spelled with eight ‘L’s, not one. It’s MacNeillllllll.

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