Brilliant Corners

I've had the idea for this web application for over a year now, but haven’t done much with it. Well, I take that back. I started and stopped it about three or four times, but I always stalled on some small detail or became distracted by something else. This time I'm going to do quite a bit more planning up front to avoid the traps I fell into in the past. I also thought I'd post about my progress here on the weblog. Hopefully, this exercise will help me organize my thoughts and ideas.

The last big web application project I built was Lists of Bests (archive of my version, current version), but it’s been two years since I sold the site to The Robot Co-op. I haven’t done anything of note since then. Well, I could mention the intranet app I work on for a small Dallas-based company, but no one outside of the company will ever see it, so that one doesn’t count (even though it is pretty awesome). It’s now well past time for me to start up something new, and the fact that I have the idea, that’s all for the better. I will say that the idea behind THE PROJECT isn’t an entirely new idea, but my plans are to make a good idea even better. We'll see if I can deliver on that!

I plan on covering much of the progress of the application while I'm working through it: technology used; layout decisions; administrivia; and everything else. However, I will keep the actual focus of the web application secret until I get a little further along in the process, although some clues may surface throughout the series of posts. The next couple of posts will cover more general ideas and questions, before I start writing any code at all. Then I'll get into the meat of building the full-on web application. So stay tuned!

As a final note, a bit of inspiration for putting this series together goes to Garrett Dimon and the blogging he’s been doing while building his app Sifter.