Meidura soft launch notes — Oct 5–6

Soft launch so far: 6 members through private invites · ~35–40 photos on the site.

We cracked open Meidura with private invites yesterday. Not a big public splash — just a quiet “come in if you know the code” soft launch so real family could poke at real photos.

It stuck. Small numbers, but they’re real people on a live site, which is the only metric that mattered this weekend. Roughly a dozen of those photos are published; the rest sit as drafts waiting on short descriptions (about 12 published / 22 drafts if you’re counting).

Behind that, the team shipped hard: twenty-one releases across the day and overnight, zero rollbacks, and the test suite climbed past forty-four hundred green checks. Almost every bug I filed from the iPad got fixed the same day. The one we couldn’t reproduce was a heart button that may have been my own photo (no self-likes by design).

What actually changed for people using the site:

• Invite links with a code word. Share a link, set a cap, leave it open thirty days, optionally slap a QR on it. Family joined through mine.
• Batch describe. Upload a pile, then describe them together — where/when once, then a title and “this is mine” per photo. Turns a chore into a couple of minutes.
• Thank-you reminders for undescribed uploads (next morning, then daily, then weekly), so drafts don’t die in silence.
• Clearer 18+ marking, a sponsor page that actually sells (payments still off until we flip that on purpose), faster request posting, and a pile of polish that only shows up when you’re on a phone.

Sponsorship money and card payments stay off until a deliberate go-day. Bay County stays behind the curtain for now. Image screening and avatars are on. That’s the shape of a soft launch: enough surface for friends and family, nothing irreversible.

What I’m watching next is simple. Get those draft photos described and into review, keep invite links flowing for the reunion crowd, and hold the line on gates before anything that touches real money ships.

Soft launches are supposed to feel a little quiet. This one feels quiet in the good way — the site is up, people can join, photos can land, and the boring machinery (backups before migrations, parallel security and browser checks, no hand-edited cron) is doing its job.

More soon when the drafts become publishes.