develop a useful and popular web application

I’m going to start working on a very strict and minimal interface for the Getting Things Done method.

At first, it’s just going to be for my personal use, but I have a few ideas that could make it really useful for others—for example; integration with email.

Useful? Perhaps. Popular? Not really.

I thought up, developed, and released Lists of Bests about 2 years ago. I find it useful myself, and so far around 2,500 users have signed up. In the beginning I didn’t even think I could get 250! :)

I know, I know – starting too many projects, finishing too few, it’s a bad habit.

Picsels didn’t seem like something that’d gather much interest – I don’t think anyone has even tried the demo to date, so I dropped it like a cold potato ;) – I did build it into my daughter’s blog site though, which has made uploading pictures a whole lot easier.

Now though, I’m really getting into this idea I had for a web app I call OnTrack. It’s going to be a system for working with online bands – creating music or parts of music (Tracks – hence the name), and from these, creating songs and perhaps eventually albums. If you find yourself collaborating with the same people again and again, maybe you’ll want to form a band, which the system will also support.

The music you create could then be published from the site as well, so that people may download it, perhaps at a small fee.

It’s a fun project, and I’ve even manage to get a friend of mine (who plays bass) engaged in building it, so now it’s a real project with more than one person assigned to it. Cool.

Well, I made a php script that checks a xanga page for comments, and makes an RSS feed out of them.

Check it out at http://whee.dk/services/php/xangacomments.php?user=<username>

Picture selection, or PicSels for short is ready in a simple v0.1 for IE6 only – sorry folks, haven’t had time to fix it for other browsers, though I might be able to.

What you do is go to http://whee.dk/picsels/ and select ‘Upload picture’ – browse for an image on your disc, then drag the edges of the image to select a sub-area. When you click upload, the image is sent to the server and cropped according to your selection.

A later version will allow you to make several selections on an image in one go, but for a start, I think this is pretty ok.

Oh, and please remember that anyone can see the cropped versions of pictures you upload (I don’t store the uncropped versions), so don’t put anything up there you don’t want people to see. Also, I’ll clean up the pictures list regularly, so don’t depend on your pics being there tomorrow.

Well, I figured with little spare time on my hands, I might as well start small. So I’m working on a little tool for uploading images to my websites. When I take a picture with my digital camera, the image is way too large to be used on the web, so I usually do two things: crop it and scale it. Sometimes, though, it’d be nice to have several different versions of a picture, different cropping, and/or different scales – thumbnail and mid- and high-resolution, for example. Starting up an imaging tool for these tasks is a bit of a bother, and I usually have a browser window open for editing my website anyway.

The tool I’ve made so far only allows for one crop/scale setup, but it should be easy to add to it. So you select a picture, it’s shown in the browser, and you can draw crop areas on it and select which sizes you want each crop area in. Note that the image isn’t uploaded until after you’ve selected the crops, so you haven’t actually spent the time uploading a 2 meg image if you change your mind halfway through.

I’ll throw up a demo later this week, I hope.

I have been toiling in virtual anonymity for years trying to accomplish this feat.

The essays presented at www.paulgraham.com has recently given me that little bit extra to help me forward. I highly recommend the read if you are interested in accomplishing this goal.

It is a worthy and lofty pursuit so stay after it.

From all of my experiences and most importantly failures, make sure that what you build is tested and it is something that others will use before you invest any more time in to it. This will save you a lot of heartache later on.

I purchased a web hosting plan to host my gallery. I’ve ended up hosting three non-profits in the process, still have to put my gallery up. (smirk)
But the domain name I registered begs for something more. (artrig.com)
the idea:
the initial inspiration for the name was to create a community forums site to discuss hardware / software for creatives. There’s a couple of these already but no solid resourse… this idea came from an old yahoo discussion group I started.

while still day-dreaming about it I decided I wanted to make it an e-zine. Something like this: discussions (or blogs) have a rating. Highly rated threads generate invitations to start a community article, rather like a wiki entry. Articles are compiled, and PDF releases are made public.

so I need to get a great wiki and unify it with a discussion or blog, and build a strong permissions hierarchy into this.

that’s about where I’m at. I’m looking at Ruby/Rails now…