BambooInvoice has been released for almost a year now, and I have to say that its picked up much more momentum then I ever thought it would.  The lowly “proof of concept” application has grown so much.  I have no idea how many people use Bamboo to keep their invoicing straight, but I do know that those who choose to use it are a very diverse group.  We seem to run the gamut from hard-core developer to freelance writers.  I’ve been contacted by artists and programmers, designers and architects (well ok, only 1 architect).  There are “Bamboo-ers” in at least 7 countries, and at least 5 languages.  And if my “request for translators” post showed me anything, its that there is interest there for many more.

But now I’m up against a hard decision.  I desperately want to enable users to use Bamboo in their native languages - and not force English on them.  But I’ve learned a huge lesson here about software development.  Namely, internationalizing cannot be an afterthought as it’s just too difficult.

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

I only wish this story was an April Fools joke.

I’m still in the process of moving everything over to my Macbook.  I’m nearly there, but one of the lingering tasks has been getting my invoicing system (BambooInvoice^*) up and running properly.  I’ve been putting it off, mostly because I’ve got so many other “more important” things to do.  What could be more important then collecting money you ask?  Um… well… actually I got nothing - I guess its just a case of putting off my own stuff while I get other obligations out of the way.

Today, I had a chance to start migrating that stuff, and so at 4 o’clock I turned on the Dallas/Phoenix game (go Steve Nash!) and started tinkering.  As it turns out, I wouldn’t finish until nearly 7 o’clock.  As the author of Bamboo, I’ve installed it literally dozens of times on many, many different environments.  I figured this would be a 30 second process, then another 30 seconds to migrate over my data and I’d be done.  Unfortunately, things never go that smoothly do they?  The opening page loaded up, but no stylesheets would render, no images were visible, and darn it… the links didn’t work. This is the first CodeIgniter site I’ve set up on my Macbook, so I figured it was probably just a little setting somewhere.  No problem, let’s go down the list.