I have three smallish website projects I plan to finish in this time. They’re in various stages of completion now.

The first is a mailing list archive. I’ve been tinkering with it on and off for about 18 months, and it’s the closest to a finished state. I really enjoy reading mailing lists, but haven’t been impressed with any of the sites out there. Often each message is its own page and threads are broken up. So I’ve done a lot of work on threading above and beyond the basic In-Reply-To and Re: matching, and the site is designed to show a thread per-page with lots of keyboard controls to make it easy to skim. Depending on free time this weekend, I may actually launch this before I leave town.

Second is a site cataloging Ruby gems. When I was searching out Rails forums I realized there’s a related problem in finding libraries that I could address. I’ve done the work to collect basic info on gems, it remains to collect news and blog posts and combine it into a nice presentation.

The last small project is my RailsRumble project (which I didn’t finish): a site for collaboratively producing transcripts of conference presentations. I’ve let this one simmer in the back of my mind in the four months since that failure and I’ve given it a better name and planned which features to finish, redesign, or drop. It needs a few days of solid development, a graphic design, and some seed content.

I plan to finish and launch these three projects by the end of March, and I’ll post more as I work on them.

The commonality in these three projects is that once I’ve launched them they require minimal ongoing attention from me and can grow at their own paces. I’m doing them first because small and well-defined projects fit well with the interrupted and distracted time I’ll have. I’d also want to make sure I start out with some successes.

Next posts: NearbyGamers and The Big Project That I Really Need To Name Already.

Poor scheduling

Couldn’t stay up because work is demanding in the election season, so working late would mean I’d limp through the next week of important coverage. More than that, though, was a bad mistake in scheduling a social outing. I didn’t figure in some of travel time and the friend driving wanted to spend a lot more time out, so instead of having a nice morning out I got home at 7 PM tired and in a foul mood. I was able to relax a bit and get some code done, but it cut my available time by more than half.

Too many new toys

I knew I hadn’t played with encoding video before, so I asked an expert for some tips and tinkered around breaking test videos down into short, easily-transcribed segments. Not coincidentally, this is basically the only feature that works. I started with bort to get a lot of basic functionality quickly, but I had no experience with most of the plugins it provided (and those I otherwise planned to use).

aasm

Differences between acts_as_state_machine (which I started with) and aasm (the successor that bort ships).

haml

Translating scaffolding from erb to haml and a (still-unsolved) bug that causes it to render content twice on one page. (And I’ve even used haml before.)

open_id_authentication/restful_authentication

I wanted users to be able to contribute anonymously or use OpenID to receive credit for their contributions without having to set up an account, and the plugins came configured for conventional user accounts.

resource_this

I had to fix a templating bug, and there’s a fair amount of magic to learn to work with.

rspec

Scaffolded tests needed slow, tedious tweaks to work with resource_this. I think I like the idea of rspec more than the implementation.

paperclip

Sorting out finicky path/url issues, and I couldn’t find a way to mock validates_attachment_presence so several models went unspeced..

Each of these issues ate 30-60m, and there went the time to build. Some plugins (acts_as_versioned, footnotes, random_finders) just worked great, but none was really related to core functionality. Speaking of which:

Core featureset too big

The line between nothing and application includes site graphic design, listing conferences, uploading presentation videos, splitting videos into segments, adding transcripts, viewing all of the these, editing transcripts… I had a lot of features listed as optional, but there was still a long set of base features and each uncovered another one of those frustrations.

No teammates

It would’ve helped a lot to have someone to work with. Not just because it would have taken less time to finish the core features, but for the enjoyment of teamwork and to complement my weaknesses.

All told

I’m glad I spent time I spent hanging out in #railsrumble or on the RailsRumble present.ly. Even if it didn’t directly result in items checked off the todo list, it’s been a fun community to be in, and I was glad to help folks out. I’m eager to see what other people came up with.

I didn’t enter RailsRumble to win, I entered for the excuse to create what I thought was an interesting small project. I’ll pick ConfReader back up in a little while, probably after the election. I still think it’s too good an idea not to build, but I’m a bit tired right now.

I’ve watched a lot of video from conferences in the last month or two, and they really frustrated me. Video is slow and linear — I could read five presentations instead of watching one and wondering if it’s going to be worth the time it takes. I really appreciate all the presentations, I just get impatient trying to find out if I’m going to enjoy one, or waiting for the speaker to make their next interesting point. And it’s hard to share them — “Hey, skim this web page” is a lot easier than “Hey, commit to watching this hour”.

My app is going make it easy for folks to collaboratively transcribe presentations so anyone can read them alongside the slides. It’ll break up video into short pieces so people can help transcribe in a few minutes’ spare time rather than a big hours-long investment. If the presenter has put their slides online, they’ll be integrated with the text. If you’re a expert with Flash video and want to join in, I could use a hand — otherwise, that part of the app will probably just be very plain, a video with a timeline control at the bottom rather than something specialized for transcription.

If this sounds like a useful site, I’d really appreciate a few minutes of your help late Saturday or early Sunday. Teams can only be 4 people, but I got the OK to allow the public to work on content on the site during the contest so it doesn’t have to launch empty. Just watch this blog (or mail me if you’d like me to remind you) this weekend for the call to come start using the site. Even a few minutes would be a big help.