The Opportunity

Evan and I were enjoying our chicken sangdos at Cafe du Soleil when we came across this in a post by Fred Wilson:

“I want to scrobble my blogreading and publish it as a blog roll on AVC. If it exists, please send me the link and I’ll add it today. If it doesn’t, please someone build it and I’ll be your first user.”

We have had some experience with Firefox extensions and thought that we could build a product that would let the user monitor their specific blogreading with almost no effort on their part. We decided to take Fred up on his "first user" offer.

Getting Started

To kick off, Evan set up our Git repo and our rails project while I sketched out the feature set (determined to keep the scope small) and acquired the URL: blogrollr.com.

Then, from 11am to 3:00 am we worked like mad, alternating between the outlet-less Café du Soleil and the internet-less, Page Street Fortress of Fictitude. We knocked out a solid design (which we later refined), admin controls, signup process, all the basic functionality, and of course an embeddable widget / Firefox extension.

To accomplish this feat, we stuck to a strict diet of caffeine / sugar. This included 10 different types of soda, much coffee, and one misguided beer. When we finally called it a night and shot out an email to Fred, we were pretty proud of the results.

Results

You can sign up at the BlogRollr site. Below is a screen shot of the home page after some refinement.

You can check out our live BlogRollr widget on our About page.

And of course, the icing on the cake was that Fred liked it and signed up. We got this in an email a few days after we sent BlogRollr in:

Expect a few users today:
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/introducing-blogrollr-a-blogroll-that-works-the-way-i-want-it-to.html-Fred

You can head over to AVC and check it out. Pretty sweet.