Site Development

I took the initiative to draft a requirements document for the site which wasn't too difficult. I based the entire thing off of a great open source asp portal that I used for the My Baby Updates(MBU) site called ASP-Nuke. I also worked on incorporating the company and drafted a "Corporate Governance" document that was to serve as an operating agreement for the LLC we formed. This didn't take long and development was soon under way.

I decided that instead of starting off with the MBU source, I should upgrade to the latest version of the released ASP-Nuke code. This brought in several new features and removed the worry of having to undo a lot of modifications to the original source that I did to make ASP-Nuke multi-group enabled. Having the latest version in hand, I set off to create the user interface. I decided on a clean layout using an orange and blue color scheme (tribute to UF). I contacted Jeff, the graphic artist that I used in the past, to come up with a logo to round out the interface.

By November we had the skelleton of the system working. I had incorporated the subscription management system, the credit card processing interface, user managment and pretty much everything else except for an automated method of collecting data and posting the tables. I wound up taking responsibility for the interface to the data service. Initially I contacted The Financial Times Interactive Data (FTID) group for access to end of day equities and options data. I wound up speaking to Ami Nappi. This would turn out to be the most unprofessional person I've ever encountered in my life. She started off telling us that the cost for the data feed would amount to roughly $4 per user per month with no minimums. I thought that was great and I asked her to move forward in setting up test accounts on their server and providing more detailed documentation. After several weeks, with few returned calls, the price jumped up to close to $20 per user with a $1000 per month minimum. We went through four more iterations of this type of haphazzard behavior before I found out that the product they were selling me wasn't capable of offering us the data we needed. I ended up wasting two months due to Ami! The funny thing was that I would later receive a call from another FTID rep excusing Ami's behavior and asking for our business back. It was too little too late by then, I had already chosen another provider.

After the debacle with FTID I contacted Thomson Financial Services. I was quickly hooked up with their rep in Ft. Lauderdale and ended up speaking with a specialist for the Data Stream product. After getting an NDA from me, they set me up on a test server that had lots of problems. I worked through a lot of them and ended up developing a system that was capable of doing what we needed to do. The Thomson data feed would end up costing around $3K per month so we decided to use the temporary method Dr. X found until we had sufficient cash flow to justify the expense.