Hope Springs Eternal

Okay, so I've been having one of my more ambitious weeks recently. I've been doing a lot of reading recently about various technologies that have been popping up while I wasn't paying attention. I feel like a bad geek. I've spent almost the entire last year playing java web application/application server/database/unix boy, so I've decided I need to broaden my horizons.

How do I plan to do that, you ask? Simple, I make up some project that hopefully scratches an itch of mine, and at the same time allows me to cram as many buzzwords as I can into it.

So, what is this grand uber-project that's appeared to me like a beacon in the night? Simple, the same one that always comes to me: All My Stuff. I've got hundreds of CD's & DVD's. More video games than I can count. Books, oh the books. And computer software, I've lost more than I can even remember. Every time I have a moment of motivation, I decide I'm going to do this project. Without fail, I get into the designs, get excited, and then a shiny new crackrock floats my way and it takes me another year to get motivated again.

As always, I initally had simple aspirations. I thought of making an MT category for DVD's, and populating it the old fashioned way. After my inner-geek got done laughing at me, I realized it would have to be much grander than that. Why stop at DVD's? Brad Choate's got a nice blog of his gaming habit up, why don't I throw in some of that as well? Then I went out and bought a half dozen books this weekend. After an hour of OCD trauma trying to come up with a mechanism for storing my now oversized 'To read' stack, I realized "Hey, why not just include those too?".

So, what are we looking to do here?

  • Crazy web app.
  • Add, edit, view, delete, & search media.
  • Add media types and attributes??
  • Do some other crazy stuff that I haven't thought about enough just yet.

    • What kind of crazy things do I want to learn/use/hack/play with??

  • Struts: I write stupid java webapps all day, and every time I see a real one it's written on the struts framework. I've done some reading, and it's definitely very nice. I'm not completely sold on Java just yet, but if that is the way I go, it'll be a crazy struts app (plus Velocity templates)
  • Web Services: Yeah, yeah, I did the hello world web service, I'm looking for the real deal here. Enter a DVD title, I fetch the appropriate data for the disc. Enter an ISBN, I go get everything there is to know about that book. You get the idea.
  • A general exercise in CSS/XHTML/RSS/XFroms/Jigga-Ma-Thing presentaion/layout system I'm not familiar with
  • MT plugins: I've been looking for an excuse to write some Perl, and this is my opening. Write the data model for the uber-media app, then develop MT tags to include all that data in your blog.

    • So, I'm feeling a little ambitious. This is the part where J$ says, "Chuckie, you're dumb. Buy a bike and World Series Baseball 2K3 and continue your worthless existence." Thanks, J$. I needed that.

    Categories

    blog , programming
    Posted by wismar on April 21, 2003 7:04 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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