Cerrisian Blog

Well, we went farther up the reservoir this time and Mike joined us. It was threatening to rain but we made it through the entire hike without getting soaked, so that was good. I took a few photos as well, so it was all good.

We saw a chipmunk and went a bit farther on the loop. I definitely want to bring my telescope out there sometime during a new moon. I bet there is almost no light pollution in the valley after the second reservoir.

On the way back, we saw hundreds of crows apparantly flocking into the canyon for the night, it was very impressive and a little frightening.

So, we came up with two website ideas during the hike:

• A RPG website that’s community based, something like a hybrid between ficlets and a wiki for back story material (including photos, maps and art), and then forms to create character sheets and a “chatroom” to play sessions in. it would also have a user database of items to use in campaigns.Once a user logged in, they could GM a new campaign. The campaign could be set to invite only or open to the public and would include snippets on backstory, grit, etc. Or it could be an “open game” that was decided by the players and the GM after they had gathered. The sessions would be recorded in a log format and then converted into back story, etc. It would also handle all the dice roll calculations based on the character sheets. The GMs and campaigns could then be rated by the players.

• A music review/information blog website.

The RPG site sounds like a lot of fun, if albeit challenging. Building it on top of Pinax would work like a charm. The hardest part would be making either a COMET or AJAX interface for chat, and the rating/trust system, of course.

Alrighty, time for the spec writing to start!

drumroll

So, the basic goal is to create a link-repository application where people can submit links on a topic and they can be ranked, verified and deprecated as needed. E.g.

Submitting a Link

Bobby finds a neat link about plate tectonics. he goes to the website “tectonic-plate-o-matics.com” to enter the link to the community. He sees the current links ranked by rating. In a corner, he sees “Submit link”. He clicks and and is given a form that has the following inputs:

• Link URL
• Link title
• Tags

He then submits the link and sees it show up on the front page. Note: Since Bobby isn’t logged in when he submits the link, it doesn’t show up for other anonymous users. Just the submitter and any users that have the “See anonymous links” set to true.

Ranking Links

Bobby now clicks on one of the links on the front page. He is taken, in a unobtrusive frame, to the link. The frame has a few buttons or inputs on it, including:

• rank +1
• rank -1
• add tags
• report link

When he clicks on any of these, he’s taken to a login page, the login page supports either open id or creating a user account on the web page itself. After he’s logged in, he is returned to the page he was on. It also contains a list of current tags for the link.

It also has a prominent “close X” button which cleanly closes the frame.