I just spent about two weeks doing what's known in software engineering as a "spike investigation." This is somewhat unusual, so it's worth explaining: Say you have a feature you'd like to implement. It's not absolutely essential, but it would rank high in the priority queue if its cost were reasonably low. A spike investigation is the commitment of a little effort to … [Read more...] about Progress Report: Printing
Archives for September 2007
Money: Projected Costs
What are the costs involved making FromThePage a going concern? I see these five classes of costs: DNS Initial hosting bills Marginal hosting fees associated with disk usage, cpu usage, or bandwidth served Labor by people with skills neither Sara nor I possess Labor by people with skills that Sara or I do possess, but do not have time or energy to spend I can … [Read more...] about Money: Projected Costs
Progress Report: Subject Categories
It's been several days since I updated this blog, but that doesn't mean I've been sitting idle. I finished a basic implementation of subject categories a couple of weeks ago. I decided to go with hierarchical categories, as is pretty typical for web content. Furthermore, the N:N categorization scheme I described back in April turned out to be surprisingly simple to implement. … [Read more...] about Progress Report: Subject Categories
Feature: Comments (Part 2: What is commentable?)
Now that I've settled on the types of comments to support, where do they appear? What is commentable? I've given a lot of thought to this lately, and have had more than one really good conversation about it. In a comment to an earlier post, Kathleen Burns recommended I investigate CommentPress, which supports annotation on a paragraph-by-paragraph level with a spiffy UI. At … [Read more...] about Feature: Comments (Part 2: What is commentable?)
Feature: Comments (Part 1: What is a comment?)
Back in June, Gavin Robinson and I had a conversation about comments. The problem with comments is figuring out whom they're directed to. Annotations like those in Pepys' Diary Online are directed towards both the general public and the community of Pepys "regulars". Sites built on user-generated content (like Flickr, or Yahoo Groups) necessitate "flag as inappropriate" … [Read more...] about Feature: Comments (Part 1: What is a comment?)