I haven't spent much time on this blog talking about vision or theory. Perhaps that's because blogger theorizing reminds me too much of corporate vision statements, or maybe because I've found it less than helpful in other people's writing. However, once you start talking about money and control, you need to figure out what you're not willing to do. There a few principles … [Read more...] about Principles
Feature: Sensitive Tags
Sensitive tags allow passsages within a transcription to be removed from public view — visible to scribes and work owners, but suppressed in printouts or display to viewers. Why on earth is this desirable? At some level, collaborative software is about persuasion. If the mid-term goal of this project is to get the people with old letters and diaries stashed in their filing … [Read more...] about Feature: Sensitive Tags
Money: The Current Situation
For now, FromThePage has followed the classic funding model of the basement inventor: The lone developer — me — holds a day job and works on the project in his spare time. This presents some challenges: At times my job occupies all my spare time and energy, so I accomplish nothing whatsoever on the project for months on end. This is no tragedy, as the job is really very … [Read more...] about Money: The Current Situation
Feature: User Roles
I've moved into what is probably the least glamorous phase of development: security, permissions, and user management. There are four (or five) different roles in FromThePage, with some areas of ambiguity regarding what those users are allowed to do. Admins are the rulers of a software installation. There are only a few of them per site, and in a hosted environment, they … [Read more...] about Feature: User Roles
Progress Report: Work and Page Administration
As I said earlier, I've been making really good progress writing the kinds of administrative features that Rails excels at. Despite my digression to implement zoom, in the last two weeks I've added code for: Converting a set of titled images into a work composed of pages Creating a new, blank work Editing title and description information about a work Deleting a work … [Read more...] about Progress Report: Work and Page Administration