Boy Projects
Saturday, January 20, 2007

I'm back in Oxford now and to be honest I'm glad. It was nice to be in Thanet, see old friends, that sort of thing but I'm eager to get on with learning. I didn't really do much more than drink and watch TV in Thanet, being home makes me instantly lazy. I had three boy projects that I wanted to do in my month off...

1. Re-build the Manston Garden Club website. I knocked a really shaky one together a year or so ago and I was never impressed in the slightest with it. I always thought it looked like one of those 'welcome to my webpage' sites (google it). This project I did based on wordpress and its kinda ok now. If you like you can see it at manstongardenclub.co.uk

2. Re-skin and re-organise oonagi. It looks awful at the moment; cluttered, not very user friendly and lots of pointless pages. I have now done most of the design on a test site but I'm still some way from sorting it enough to go live. It will still be based on the e107 system with changes being almost entirely cosmetic. This should give the least jolt to the users who have already been through many changes on the site over the past seven years.

3. Develop Thanet Blog List Build a geographically specific collectively edited news site. Basically a reddit/digg/newsvine for Thanet, as well as being portable to other areas. This will probably be based on a system like Pligg but unfortunately I can't get it to work on my current webhost (they are a little backwards on the technology side) and am going to have to buy more webspace elsewhere. I don't have enough money till February so you'll have to wait I'm afraid. The idea came out of some brainstorming for the new Blog List build. As there were so many new blogs popping up I thought that the current approach, just posting them as blog entries, was restrictive. My 'vision' was that everyone adds new blogs and every gets to vote on whether its and good or not This should help filter out the one-post-wonders as well as letting the average reader quickly find the authoritative blogs. Even better, I wanted the user to have the possibility of having their own account where they can have feeds from their favourites, a little like netvibes, thus saving time from visiting all blogs as well as being able to see at a glance whether there are any new posts. Alas, I couldn't really get it together and quite frankly its not my project any more anyway. I think its current new design is pretty cool and it wouldn't be difficult to get a latest entry feed page on it with all the blogs listed.

So I managed about one and a half out of three projects. Thats not a very good ratio in my eyes. Lots of thoughts, lots of talk but not enough action. At least I'm more productive here in Oxford so hopefully we'll see some more results shortly.

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posted by SkinOfStars @ 11:40 pm,

2 Comments:

At January 24, 2007 2:59 pm, Blogger thanetbloglist said...

The new site is up and running!!

If it's any consolation I've got loads of projects that I've been meaning to do or are half-completed.

All they really take is me to sit down and be completely motivated to work on them In realitythey could all be completed very quickly but that thing called 'life' usually gets in the way.

 
At January 27, 2007 10:00 am, Blogger SkinOfStars said...

damn the life thing!

 

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