One thing that occurred to me today is that we really don't have a good place to put projects on deninet. For a while, I had planned on implementing project management features on the site. I did manage to start some of that by adding events and tasks. The further I got, however, the more it became obvious that "wasn't us". Other sites do project management far better and if anything, we should leverage those.

Project management, however, isn't the same as project -- is it? The former implies task lists, schedules, events, Gantt Charts... These aren't the features I wish to develop or maintain on the site. Again, other sites dedicated to that purpose do it far, far better. What I'm thinking about is a place to showcase our projects. 

Let me give you a little history: Years and years ago I came to the realization late one night that what we seemed to have in abundance was ideas. What we needed was a mechanism by which to store and categorize them. This was the beginning of a project called Net*man*a*ger. It was a Java based client for entering and storing ideas to a remote website running a Perl backend. Hey, it was the early 2000s, thick clients were all the rage! I spent most of my holiday vacation that year happily steeped in Java code.

As I began to put together the interface, I created a data topology. Ideas were made of Versions, Versions had Thoughts contributed to them, Comments and Votes were applied to Thoughts. Soon, however, I began to realize that Ideas needed a top level container. Naturally, the first one I thought of was "Project". The more I thought about it, however, the term seemed limiting. Not all Ideas could be grouped into projects, some were just....ideas. So, I instead decided to use the word "Net".

Eventually as client matured, I began to realize that it would be far simpler to develop a website that was both the backend and the front end. This was a couple before "Web 2.0" became a popular buzzword. Add more than a dash of ambition, and the "Internet Idea Database" was born. The term "nets" were dropped and replaced with "Channels".

I worked for years on IIDB, but there were a lot of problems with how it was put together. The code was too constrained and not easily expandable. I no longer wanted to work on the project, and as the system powering our website, I was stuck. I chucked it all and switched to Drupal. My thought was I could eventually reimplement IIDB on Drupal, but that never quite materialized. 

This is why deninet has channels today. First there were projects, then nets, and now channels. I had assumed that any project we wish to implement today on deninet could have a channel associated with it. These project-central channels would be the hubs by which visitors could find and follow project developments. This is why we have a Springboard, and why you can subscribe to channels to follow posts.

The biggest problem with this system is just how monolithic it is. How can we tell a "project-centric" channel from one that just is for general blog posts? There are a few ways to go about this. A field could be added that would identify the type of channel it is. This seems inadaquate however, as projects would have special fields attached to them like what users are working in what roles on the project, or the current status, or expected release date. Doesn't that imply that these should not be a channel but something unique?

I'm still figuring that one out...

The last two weeks have been more than a little draining. I've been pushing to complete a major update for a web-based class at work. While I have been working with the product for several months now, it was only a few weeks ago that I saw it in actual use. That made a huge difference to me and cemented a lot of what I was working on. I've been digging through the course material, rewriting relevant sections and discarding outdated ones. Friday I finished most of the slides, leaving only a few to complete tomorrow morning. I'll have until Wednesday to complete all the voice recording.

Meanwhile, something strange has happened to my sense of taste. For years my beverage of choice has been soda. I relied on the caffeine to keep me going and the taste for comfort at tough consulting assignments. On particularly bad days, I could lay waste to liters of the stuff. Two weeks ago on Monday, however, I cracked open a can of the stuff and actually winced. 

Like most Americans, I have a sweet tooth. Very few things have ever been too sweet for me to eat or drink. For seemingly the first time I was utterly bamboozeled by what my tongue was telling me: "Eew! Too Sweet! Yuck!" I took another sip and promptly curled my face into a scowl. What the hell? Too sweet? Since when is anything too sweet for me!?

I set the soda aside and had some coffee instead. Black it was not, but the Raspberry Latte was subtle and creamy. I found myself less jittery and tense at the end of that day then I have in a year.

I tried it again the next day, and the next. Some days I'd polish off a can, but mostly I set them aside to warm and go flat. I found diet soda inflicted far more of a penalty than regular. Soda made with cane sugar was by far the most satisfying. If I had need of carbonation, there was sparkling water.

Oddly, I blame Germany for my two new beverage addictions. Even the cheapest coffee in Germany was delicious in a way that I rarely found in the states. As I was on business, I was able to expense it all and seek out my tastes. One particular weekend I was invited to a BBQ at a coworker's near Berlin. We were served sparkling water with fresh lemon all day, and soon I found myself with yet another addiction. 

While sparkling water was provided at work, coffee was a bit of a pain. Like most offices, the coffee that's available, in a word, stinks. I'm not suggesting that we should have a barista on staff 5/40; it's difficult to provide high quality in an economy of scale. Unfortunately, this means I would have to plunk down $3-5 for a proper cup each and every time. (Oh, the woe of the salarywoman! Woe!) I have been investigating how to make a proper cup myself without too much of a cost. I fear, however, that the savings achieved will be minimal. 

One of the most requested features among our users (i.e., Me and the other four people using the site), is the ability to automatically save posts-in-progress. 

This turned out to be easier than I had thought to implement as the Drafts module provides all the needed functionality. 

Features of Drafts include:

• The ability to maintain more than one draft at a time.
• Maintain drafts for all content types.
• Autosaving of new posts.
• Autosaving of changes to existing posts.

Once you save a draft (or have it autosaved), it will be available in your drafts page, under the Springboard. Click the "View" link to open your draft. 

Enjoy!

Sorry for the poor quality, I was in a dark room and only had a cell phone camera.

One of my favorite characters to think about in the Paper Girl story is Rasa. She's brash, highly technical, often snide, and very, very sure of herself. She's also of Punjabi decent.

One of the first challenges Pazi posed to me when working on the story was the race of Rasa and her twin brother Rama. I inherited the names from a friend's project, and -- like most caucazoid authors -- completely failed to consider race at all. I had felt obligated to avoid the issue entirely rather than step on people's toes. Pazi convinced me otherwise. I expect to make many, many stupid mistakes while writing Rasa. Hopefully she'll kick me in the ass when necessary.

You might have also wondered why I said Punjabi and not "Indian American". That's the funny thing about Paper Girl -- while it's set in northern Minnesota, it's not set in the United States...