Other Web Application Development
Here are some of the other web applications that I have built or started to built that were just quick to build and that I didn’t put a lot of effort into. Some of these though I keep thinking I would like to revisit and explore where they could go.
Our Biggest Loser
www.ourbiggestloser.com
A few members of my family were planning a weight loss war for 2010 and I suddenly had the idea to create this site. Originally it was just going to be a quick and dirty for my family to compete against each other in our weight loss – but then I thought why not put a little more effort into it and make it something the rest of the world can play with.
May 2010 I received a call in early May from the local newspaper asking if they could do a story on Our Biggest Loser (and me). The article can be found here: http://north-lakes-times.whereilive.com.au/news/story/who-is-the-biggest-local-loser/
Twitchatin
www.twitchat.in
I created this site literally in about 3-4 nights. I really think there is something worth exploring with this site and I think if nothing else competes for my attention I probably will return to this site and do something with it. I created twitchat.in after I finally dragged myself into the Twitter world. The reason for creating the site was that from what I could tell at the time – heaps of people used Twitter to have conversations with each other. Missing the point – I suspect – I thought it would be awesome to tweet people or search for tweets and then from the same place be able to instantly invite people to a chat where you were not limited to 140 characters…
I still think it is a good idea even though no one else has really ever used it! When I first found Twitter there were a couple of people asking questions about Codeigniter and I wanted to try and help them out. It was frustrating to publicly converse in 140 character messages so I really wanted to create this site in order to have a normal chat. I have used it myself on a couple of occasions and it’s (for me at least) a much better way to communicate!
If I was to ever return to this it would be to adapt it as a tool for businesses to find people complaining or praising them and inviting them for a chat to either thank them, give them an offer or help to resolve any issues that were causing them to complain.
Twitsurfin
I’ve registered this domain but not done anything with it yet. I got the idea for the domain because I loved the use of the .in domain for words like surfin’ or chattin’ etc. While messing around with Twitchat.in I found a unique way of searching Tweets which was very much like the original internet idea of “surfing” but instead you are surfing the huge wave of tweets about a huge number of different topics. I’ve got the whole thing planned out in my head but I simply have not had time to work on it as it hasn’t been the highest of my priorities.
If you check out Twitchat.in you might find the seed of my unique surfin’ concept if you look hard enough – it’s not a documented feature of the site but not hard to stumble on! No stealing if you do find it and see it’s potential!
A One Word Picture
www.onewordpicture.com
There is a very well known saying that “A picture is worth a thousand words” – let us allow a single word to inspire a thousand pictures.
My wife and I are about to buy a very expensive digital SLR and I suspect I might actually start to use this site myself! I built this site very quickly as an exercise for future video tutorials. I screen recorded every single minute of me creating the site and thought that later I would do a voice over and provide it as a tutorial. It’s a very simple site with a simple concept but it shows a few development processes that I suspect some people would be interested in watching.
The only problem with the video tutorial idea was that when I came to try and do a voice over it was just a stupidly big task and, most disappointing, very difficult to remember my train of thought or follow what I was trying to commentate that it ended up just being an incoherent bumbling mess of a tutorial. Maybe some day in the future I will do this exercise again but actually record my audio at the same time and just do a massive upload of hours of video tutorial!