In the last year I’ve attempted, on several occasions, to put together a few internet-type sites that interest me. Unfortunately, I haven’t really gotten that far with any of them, mainly due to lack of time and an underestimation of the time involve for these projects by me.
So, instead of completely adandoning some of them, I’m going to put out a call for help on a few and see if there’s any interest in teaming up to finish a few of these off. So, if you think any of these would interest any of your friends, let me know. I think we have plenty of technical help (although if you want to lend some, let me know), but would love to have some designing help.
So, here they are, in order of interest by me.
For those of you who check out my flickr photos, either on here or via flickr, most of the ones that people really tend to like are the ones that were taken using a HDR (high dynamic range) technique. Since I’ve spent a lot of time and resources learning about the subject, I thought I would put together a little informative site for others interested in the field. Some of the things I wanted to accomplish are:
1. Integration with a Flickr group (that can be viewed on the site)
2. A Best-Of section, chosen by the people involves in the website
3. Some contests and prizes from time to time (which would involve sponsorship from some local photography stores or HDR software vendors)
4. Some forum for user interaction
That’s a good start. The website is up, but pretty empty right now. I was playing with WordPress at the time, but am open to using something like Drupal.
This was an idea I had over a year ago. But, I was going to develop a HDR library and appropriate browser plugins so that people could assemble HDR images at home for free. I’ve written a good chunk of the library (to the point of assembling the HDR image from JPEGs), but didn’t do any of the tone-mapping stuff yet.
These are others that are less important, and to be honest, I’d probably just give the domains to people if they could convince me they’d do something along the lines of what I was thinking (although it would be nice to work together and do something).
3. ResearchCellar (www.researchcellar.com)
During university I was sick of groups like the IEEE taking control of the research I was doing. So I set out to develop and open-source style of peer-reviewed research. I imagine something could be set up in sort of a digg.com style peer rating system. But the end result I wanted was all the research to be available for free to everyone.
4. QuarterPel (www.quarterpel.com)
Some of the best video algorithms do what is called quarter-pel motion estimation, which basically means they can resolve differences up to a quarter of a pixel in size. I grabbed this domain name originally thinking it would be cool for a video-centric type website, but I can’t remember what my original idea was.
And last but not least, I’ve about to release a free RSS reader on the Mac. It’s not as feature rich as some of the other ones that I’ve seen, but most of the ground work has been done, and it should be easy to add features based on feedback from friends. Plus, it’s going to be free. If you’re interested in trying it out, just drop me a line (I have a universal binary now for it). It’s called TrollDigger, and will be showing up on TrollDigger.com in a few days.
Cool. But having everything (especially projects….) at a completely separate domain name is….a pain in the ass.
Maybe something like projects.duanestorey.com, with a little section for each project, and then some shared areas, like forums, where there is one forum per project. A blog with categories per project will round it out. I mean, that’s like 4 projects already if you include your WordPress Flickr plugin stuff.
An RSS reader for the Mac? I’m intrigued…but of course, I wouldn’t have read this at all, since I’m logged into Windows and reading via Google Reader 😛
Hey.. Well, the domain names I purchased over the course of a few years.. I agree for things like my flickr plugin and what not that it wouldn’t hurt to put it as a subdomain, but in terms of a big rss reader or something, I think I’d rather have the full domain. In fact though, they all map to subdomains of my site (www.trolldigger.com maps to trolldigger.duanestorey.com, but shh, don’t tell anyone).. in terms of setting that up, it’s $7 with godaddy for the domain, and a few clicks of the mouse on my hosting site, so not really a big deal.
I actually am using google reader right now, but I’m not really a big fan because it basically means that google reader is polling the websites, and I’m polling google reader. I’d rather have a background app giving me growl notifications whenever a new entry comes off the wire, or having the ability to flag which keywords in entries I want to be alerted of. But to each their own. I’m playing around with some of the accessibility things as well. For example, I tied it into the OS X speech synthesis API to have the computer actually read each RSS entry to you (if you want) Probably limited use for the average user, but for someone that is visually impaired, I think things like can make a world of difference.
re: entry off the wire — let’s talk through Jabber and Publish-and-Subscribe. I think that could be a good twist for the app.
I agree the “top level domains” are good for marketing purposes. For SEO it doesn’t matter, or is actually counter productive. I was thinking more from a management perspective: it’s a pain in the ass to manage so many things as actual separate sites.