Agylen

I’ve been pretty quiet recently about my little pet project: Source.zone. Now, this quietness does not imply that the project is stagnating. Quite the contrary. In my copious free time— which mostly means in the weekends — I’ve been writing a significant amount of code, with interesting results, namely:

Confluence is gone

The current version relies on Atlassian Confluence to manage its contents, but the final one won’t. While Confluence is a nice product and it’s great to be able to use it under a free license (thanks, Atlassian friends), at the end of the day using a Wiki for what I need to do means having to twist and bend it beyond recognition. So, I went back to the tried and true way: a relational database with Hibernate and Spring on top for ease of development. This does not completely rule out using Confluence for something: a Wiki might be useful, after all, but not as the primary source of content.

Tags

On the heels of the success of del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, … I implemented tagging for projects. The interface for attaching tags to a project is still rudimentary, but it’s a start. Next in line is using the tags to link to del.icio.us, Technorati and maybe other services.

RSS

Every project category has an RSS feed, so you can keep up to date from the comfort of your favorite aggregator. Support for RSS feeds for tags and reviews is planned.

Reviews

Project reviews a-la Amazon are implemented. Since this was one of the primary features planned, I’m quite satisfied.

With all these features implemented, I’m really looking forward to a launch in the not too distant future. But what’s missing?

Authentication and authorization

The development version is completely open: no authentication and no authorization. I’m tempted to keep it like this, at least initially, in Wikipedia style. I’m sure abuse will soon ensue, but maybe it can be managed and kept at a reasonable level for a while. Anyway, it’s not my number-one priority right now.

Look & feel

I grew bored of the current website layout and style. I need to find something better. I’m starting to think a minimalist approach is better.

Community features

Forums, mailing lists, …

Hosting

I’m very satisfied with my current hosting provider: Bytemark. I will need a new virtual machine, with more memory and bandwidth before going live and if the website starts drawing some serious traffic, a dedicated host will probably be necessary. Nothing troubling here, but I don’t want to throw money at it. Using my free time without accounting for it is fine, but live expenses need to be recovered, so I’ll have to make a business plan that includes some form of revenue: For a start, Google AdSense and possibly some affiliate programs, like Amazon Associates, will do.