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Summer projects

21.Jul.2007

Photo by mcmrbt at Flickr.

Finally I’m on holidays. Today I did the last exam of my first university year. Now it’s time to rest and have fun. But in the meantime, when I’m not traveling or resting on some beach, ideas keep flowing about interesting things to do. I was thinking about starting a web application using Rails.

The plan

One thing I’ve been noticing is that contact information still isn’t well distributed on the web. We keep adding small bits of our information on our blog, at website forms, many times repeating ourselves. So I was thinking about creating a personal contact page for everyone. You just enter the contact data you want public and a (probably personalized) page will be created for you with it. How could that page help? If we add a special invisible ingredient, all the contact information can be parsed and extracted for whatever purpose. Probably it would be most useful for filling in form data, if for example OpenID isn’t supported.

There’s already a live example that I know of that uses the above mentioned feature. Satisfaction is a platform for customer service that asks for an optional hCard to help fill their signup form. But I system like this could fill up many more form fields, if needed, simply providing your contact page.

I’m also thinking about small widgets for blogs if you want to make sure your contact page doesn’t go unnoticed. The widget may have only the most important information and a button to a generate your vCard for contact managers such as Outlook or Evolution.

And you?

Are you also planning your own summer project? Do you know of some initiative like Summer of Rails, not necessarily Rails related, where developers can share their experiences and projects? I’m also looking for feedback on my idea. Probably I’m forgetting some killer feature. And if any designer out there liked the idea and wants to participate I’d be happy to have some help…

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2 Comments

That's a very interesting project but, as any project of that type, it depends on heavy support by other websites and systems... Good luck for it anyway, it would be great to see it work out in the future. As for projects I believe my only project this summer is a revamp of my current projects bringing them new life after about a year of neglect from my part.

dextro / 21.Jul.2007 at 01:33am

Microformats already had the cold start problem but were able to be widely available through out the web. I think now it's just a matter of time for people to start to adopt them in their projects, increasing their value for the regular user.

Good luck for your projects revival, the creation is just the quickest part of our job...