Hurray for Filipiniana.net

T'was a time boggling and stressful day for the group as we started our countdown launch. We should come up with the final version of the site and should be online by September 27 (New York date) at all cost. Our publisher who is currently in New York is dying to see the webpage up. And he doesn't care if we have the final content or not. He rather want to see it incomplete rather than nothing to see at all.

For the record, I have uploaded our initial teaser page last January this year and he can no longer wait to see it after 6 months. He want to see it so we can have his personal perusal to the site. His friends and international business contacts were already waiting for that page to be uploaded to see what we can offer. This would determine how serious we are with the project and he doesn't want to disappoint them with the target deadline.

He personally marketed the site abroad, researched and gathered all the materials and sent it back to us here in Manila. His vast collection are rare books and images and What burdens us, is the process of digitization and the tedious editorial and technical process we undergone in between. Frankly speaking, we lack the necessary manpower and depends on our capability to provide initial contents to our database.

With optimistic minds, we plan our set of actions for the past 6 months, debate on the search results, tested our database and came up with the interface design. Our team was divided into three groups, the content development team, the web group and the editors. Each team has its important role to play and one more thing that our publisher requires us is- our contents should be based on the international standards.

And so, every tick of time in the eve of September 27 (Manila Time) is so important to us. And while a supertyphoon "Milenyo" is expected arrive in Manila the following day we are at the office till dawn. We want everything perfect with our database. Searching facility should be precised with results and initial documents should be up. We test the Forum page, the Image database, the blog portal, the content management system and last minute redesign of the homepage. And finally, the redirection of our present domain to our server.
Exactly 4:57 pm of September 27 (New York Time) as the typhoon wind starts to break into the Manila area, a new look of Filipiniana.net was born. Now, Do read it Houston?

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