The January Project
Well, it’s been busy over the festive period. Back in Thanet for Christmas then straight to Jersey for New Years Eve. Home in Oxford now, it’s good to be back. I’ve got a busy semester coming so I’ve decide to just throw myself back into work. I’m planning on have my computing part of my dissertation finished by the end of January, thereafter leaving me eight weeks to write 5000 words on the open development of my computing dissertation in a suitably applied social sciences fashion. Lets start with a little open reflection what I’m constructing.
I am making a news and events information filtering web application. It works like this: News and event announcements comes in one end via submission, XML feeds (RSS, Atom, etc) and possibly some kind of easy tagging widget thingy. Once they are in people get to vote on which is the best story. We have some pages for displaying the popular stories which can be customised by the user based on factors like time or category. These customised filters can then be collected in XML, like Netvibes or iGoogle or just Firefox bookmarks. I’ll probably also throw in some social networking tools as well.
The site should be going live at the start of February and will initially be targeting the Oxford area. At roughly the same time the beta code (built using Ruby on Rails) will be made available on another site with a suitable open license.
I shall post further updates through January on this very blog.