Created: 07 Sep 2004
So, I’m fortunate man. Am I going to carry on sitting on my arse, watiting for something to happen to me? No. I’m going to do something. Specifically, I am going to develop two small to medium complexity dynamic websites.
Firstly, I’m tired of having to rely on Amazon’s website to search for books. We have freedb.org for CDs and IMDB for films. I’d like a similar database for books. Of course, I have no illusions that (even if my site functions adequately) many people will use it, but it would be an interesting social experiment and an interesting design challenge. The design should encourage users to enter meaningful data in the database, correct entries which are wrong and include useful things such as the ISBN number and the publisher. It is interesting that freedb.org solves some of these problems to a limited extent by having enough users, so that someone, somewhere will notice that the capitalisation of track titles is wrong on their UNKLE CD and be annoyed enough by it to correct it (yes, that was me). I’m not holding freedb.org up as a shining example of a collectively administered database, but there’s is a similar problem domain. One of the most interesting stories is how freedb.org came to exist at all. The predecessor, CDDB, was owned by a company called Gracenote, which started to restrict what developers could do with the API used to query the CD database and require developers to supply an ID so they could trace whose product was querying their database. They developed a much more powerful API which they charged for. What happened? Someone started freedb.org, which worked using the old CDDB API and enough developers were annoyed enough to change their products to use that instead. The lesson I have learned here? Provide a good API to allow site developers to access your data.
My second project is a commercial website for my own potential business venture, which I intend to complete in six months. It’s a pilot for a larger project and will rely on having smart backend systems. My theory is that I will be able to prototype the system and test the feasibility of my project without spending a penny - just my time.
I’m not prepared to reveal what my commercial project is because my plan entails sneaking up on the limited number of competitors in the market and stealing their lunch fast. If it doesn’t succeed, that will be fine. My outlays will be reasonably fixed, other than my development time, which is free and I should be able to stop spending money without annoying any customers.
So, there it is. Better than waiting for Richard Herring to write a new blog entry. Something that should stretch my software development and programing skills. Part of the fun will be writing down what I’ve learnt here.