Inching Forward

Over the last few months I’ve been working in Django quite a bit.   During this time, I created 2 sites:

Exploding Ants
Exploding Ants is a skateboarding news links site.   Originally I envisioned 2 main goals for the site:  a continuously human-updated set of skate-related news links, and a wiki containing comprehensive data on skaters, sponsors, videos, magazines, etc.   News links would tie in to the wiki.   Every wiki page would have an rss feed and user-submittable comments so you could watch for news  and talk with others about your favorite skaters, sponsors, blogs, etc.   After I completed the wiki portion of the app, I started seeding it with data, which is an exhausting process.   My time was increasingly spent tracking down birthdays, ex-sponsors, video and magazine editors and filmers instead of writing code.  The skateboarding universe has a wealth of information, and finding it leisurely is a joy.  Finding all of it at once for data entry is tedious.   I took a break from it and haven’t gotten back to it.

Since it was easy enough, I added comments (using Disqus) and twitter integration (follow Exploding Ants here).  Despite my parental abandonment, the site is still alive and “useful”:  I try to post at least one skate news link a day.   It was a great exercise, fun to build, and keeps me current with skateboarding news.  There’s so much I’d like to do with Exploding Ants that I can’t let it go–I just need to find the time to fit it in.

EZDo
I’m always trying to find a way to manage To Do lists, and despite many solutions out there, I’ve never found anything that would last longer than a couple of weeks.   I dislike using pointy-clicky solutions to what is mostly a text problem, but I want my to do lists to be available wherever I go.   The system I used up until EZDo was to ssh into a personal account and manually add items to a text file formatted a certain way.   EZDo was written with text entry in mind.

The interface for EZDo displayed a text field that allowed you to enter commands like “add” “view x” “edit x” “complete x” (where “x” was a sequential number displayed next to the post), etc.   If you entered the “new” command, a form would be displayed that allowed you to enter a title, body, priority, and tag the entry, then save.   If you entered a “view” command, you would be presented with the markdown->html version of the entry which allowed you to tab to links and hit enter to access them.   Everything worked off keyboard entry from the “command line”–no mouse required.

But, like every other system, I stopped using it after a few weeks.   Maybe it’s a mental thing where I want the power of a full text editor whenever, you know, editing text.  Maybe it’s the fact that the text files on the server are in a format that can be easily read and edited with simple tools on any computer.   Whatever the reason, it’s back to ssh and text files.

After being productive with these sites, I’m ready to go back into learn mode.