The usual pleasantries

Hello there! First off, let me apologize for the title. As soon as I come up with something shorter and more descriptive, I'll swap that out.

What exactly is this?

The project is a web site and application for marketing a fictional video game that doesn't yet have a name. This fictional product, if it existed, would be in early development with the aim of becoming known and possibly generating some hype. I'm aiming to make this an exceptional portfolio piece so I've decided on a video game for the product as an excuse to do something visually striking. The user side of the application will be a simple form for submitting an email address to a mailing list. I'll be adding a security layer that should be unobtrusive enough that the user won't need to take notice of it. On the admin side, there will be a form for sending mass emails to users while taking into account a filtering option for the users.

Ok, what technologies will you be using?

The site is being built in C# using ASP.NET and a MySQL database. At the moment I'm using the MySQL connect/net ado.net library for the database interface. I'm hoping to get away with hosting the site on azure at the free hosting tier. The cost of their hosted databases are a little beyond my current budget and I'm not sure if they do anything to prevent the use of external databases although I kind of doubt that they would. I have a JavaScript library picked out for setting up a parallax visual effect on the landing page banner. This library Parallax.js by Matthew Wagerfield is pretty impressive on a desktop computer with a mouse or a mobile device with an accelerometer/gyroscope. I would like to enable the effect via scrolling for those without either. I haven't found support for it in the documentation yet so I'll keep an eye out for alternatives. (Let me know if you've found something awesome like this)

So just how far are you into this?

I've spent time over the last two-ish weeks planning, creating a mock up, and beginning production. So far I have navigation in place and all pages accessible from there. The pages are without content as of yet, but the database has been designed, created and deployed. I have a class written and tested to handle communication with the database. Next up on the to-do list is to add functionality to send emails and verify email addresses as well as building out the front end of the site, adding the forms and page content.

Didn't you say you were aiming to post each week?

That was the plan but things have been picking up this spring and it often takes longer to write than I anticipate. While this was a loose goal, I did say I would work on formalizing it so I'll switch over to a goal of posting bi-weekly and see how it goes. As I get further into this project I'll post an update, so keep an eye out if you're interested. Hopefully by then I'll have some cleaner code and a few ways not to make this particular "light bulb" to share with you.