Conclusion to the Overnight Website Challenge

Published on Mar. 02, 2009
by Kyle

Well its all done. Starting around 7:30 a.m. (official start of 9 a.m.) on February 28th and ending around 11:00 a.m. on March 1st, the Overnight Website Challenge is complete. I am proud to announce that my team, Team Praxis, were the winners.

I think we were all stunned, and a bit delusional from sleep deprivation. The non-profit we were assigned was District 202 (right now this is their old site). District 202 is a Minneapolis-based non-profit organization providing services and a community for GLBT youth from the ages of 13-22. District 202 is in the process of moving their efforts from a large brick-and-mortar organization with little web-presence to a smaller physical location with a strong online community. Since their demographic is ages 13-22, the people they help tend to be web-savvy youth with existing online social networks. As well as a website that provides them with all of the tools that a non-profit needs, we also provided them with a social network, using Ning. These youth now have a way to safely communicate with each other and foster a community of their own, they can talk directly with someone from District 202, using chat, and possible supporters are able to see the positive change they are making, and now have an easy way to contribute.

Overall the event was lots of fun, and a pretty optimal way to pull an all-nighter. A lot of people were feeling pretty miserable, and their were smells but it was an interesting site. More monitors than people, a lot of us brought our own dedicated servers for our workflow, and my teammate Justin had a cool cigarette-lighter / cup holder installed into his box instead of a second rom drive. Some neat setups. The event also had 2 projections, one displaying our countdown, and one displaying the live twitter activity surrounding the event; #webchallenge was consistently between the #3 – #8 most active topics on twitter for the whole challenge. Follow up more on this event at Inside the Nerdery, there is some good content showing everybody’s setup and our process, from discussing site objectives with the non-profits to the late hours of development. Below is a picture of our team, taken from the Nerdery, I’m on a back step eating an apple.