Friday, February 03, 2006
New name (?), new features
Name
So I was probably quick to jump on soulhouse.ca, as I have now thought of many better names. The one I really want is houseproud.com but that is reserved. The closest one I could find is homepride.ca. I'm going to sit on it for a while as I probably jumped the gun on soulhouse.ca.
New Ideas
One new Idea I have is to add a neighbourhood catalog where people can easily add their house to the catalog. The objective is to provide people with an easy place to put a profile of their house, using google maps technology. You can check out the early prototype at here. It would use to fairly current web concepts of relationship by location, and wikipedia. You navigate to your houses locations, then insert a marker for your house. The marker will bring people to your houses profile. I had planned on making it wiki so that anyone can update anything (mostly for ease of use and anonymity).
The wikipedia part worries me a little in that it could easily be used to do vandalism. Oh well, I'll jump off that bridge when I come to it.
Site Content
Thinking about the content of the site, I have decided to begin with a focus on Toronto. I have made summary notes on a book that takes you through the old houses of Toronto. This book has helped me identify the styles available in Toronto. I plan to also research newer house styles too, so that people in postwar homes can be aware of their house design, its features and design suggestions.
Site Design
Also on top of my mind is the design of the site. A key design constraint is that it needs to be easy to update and maintain. I have made the mistake in the past that a lot of HTML work is required to add content. I would like to use blog style capabilities to make it easy for me to add content to the site. I may give up style points with that approach, but a lot of things tell me that that less style and more content is good (see useit.com).
Next steps are:
- Research post war homes
- Write my first article and work out subsections and format
- Complete profile form
- Test image manipulation with Java
- Test image storage in MySQL
So I was probably quick to jump on soulhouse.ca, as I have now thought of many better names. The one I really want is houseproud.com but that is reserved. The closest one I could find is homepride.ca. I'm going to sit on it for a while as I probably jumped the gun on soulhouse.ca.
New Ideas
One new Idea I have is to add a neighbourhood catalog where people can easily add their house to the catalog. The objective is to provide people with an easy place to put a profile of their house, using google maps technology. You can check out the early prototype at here. It would use to fairly current web concepts of relationship by location, and wikipedia. You navigate to your houses locations, then insert a marker for your house. The marker will bring people to your houses profile. I had planned on making it wiki so that anyone can update anything (mostly for ease of use and anonymity).
The wikipedia part worries me a little in that it could easily be used to do vandalism. Oh well, I'll jump off that bridge when I come to it.
Site Content
Thinking about the content of the site, I have decided to begin with a focus on Toronto. I have made summary notes on a book that takes you through the old houses of Toronto. This book has helped me identify the styles available in Toronto. I plan to also research newer house styles too, so that people in postwar homes can be aware of their house design, its features and design suggestions.
Site Design
Also on top of my mind is the design of the site. A key design constraint is that it needs to be easy to update and maintain. I have made the mistake in the past that a lot of HTML work is required to add content. I would like to use blog style capabilities to make it easy for me to add content to the site. I may give up style points with that approach, but a lot of things tell me that that less style and more content is good (see useit.com).
Next steps are:
- Research post war homes
- Write my first article and work out subsections and format
- Complete profile form
- Test image manipulation with Java
- Test image storage in MySQL
# posted by Brian R. Booth @ 8:58 AM 
