I wanted to talk a little bit about a new application I saw today called ajaxWrite. This little ditty is pretty dang cool You can find it at http://www.linspire.com/ajaxwrite.php. This little ajax application claims to have many of the features (plus more to come) that currently reside in M$ word. So I tried it out and my results were pretty fantastic!!

I first just tried creating a new file, typing into the document, making things bold, underline, etc. Then I tried out the other features and while some of them don’t work correctly yet (tables, outline), others work pretty well (fonts, undo, redo, save). Afterward, I was able to open some of my word docs into it pretty successfully, which is to say that the tables and alignment didn’t come in correct, but everything else came in quite well from my limited testing.

I like the idea here, and its got a lot of potential. I really didn’t see the benefit of the tables yet, because there is no way to put in cells, but hey its a start. I am sure it will get better as time goes on, so check it out and see what you can do with ajaxWrite today!!

Cheers,

Herlo

So I have been toying with this concept of creating a website that will allow groups of people to compete with each other in a sort of “Biggest Loser” contest online.  I’ve seen a few other implementations at http://www.weightlosswars.com and http://biggestloser.mynameistim.com.  Now I will say that the one at mynameistim.com inspired me to create LardWars and I think its more of an implementation I am choosing to do.

I want to implement LardWars free of charge, maybe just have some Google AdSense on there to pay for hosting and other improvements I choose to make.  Eventually, I see it providing a charge for things like extras above and beyond what the site was initially intended to do, although I can’t think of anything now, I am sure it will come along soon.

My plan is pretty simple, provide people with a good clean interface with simple instructions and let them setup a good competition.  LardWars will have some cool graphic capability and on the front page, will show three or four different groups stats each time, maybe the best, maybe not.  Other ideas would be to let people include a (relatively small) photo with their profile to show them how good they are doing after a while.  Motivation, of course, for this site though is truly competitive and should drive everything, so there will be a prize involved and of course bragging rights on the site for anyone who wins/is winning their contest with a simple blog under the group page.

Anyway, these are some initial thoughts, comments are definitely welcome.  Oh, and I also need some help in terms of a good framework to start with the development.  I do plan on using PHP and a CMS, just haven’t decided which one, some options are e107, Joomla, phpwebsite, or doing it from scratch.  Currently, I am leaning toward scratch, but I don’t want to do the work to create db connections and caching would be a pain.  I really like what wordpress has done, so that also may be an option.

Cheers,

Herlo

So I was surfing around earlier today, and was given a link to the Utah Open Source Planet at http://openclue.org/ut/ and found this cool link to Gcast. Being somewhat new to the whole Podcasting idea, I am gonna sign on and see what it is all about, learn how to podcast my first show and see if its for me. Wish me luck.