Web Projects

Clutterme.com

Clutterme is a drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG webpage editor.  Everything happens in the user’s browser - adding new text, adding images and videos, moving and resizing everything.  The aim is a simple, intuitive way for non-tech-savvy users to easily create and update their own website.  One early review referred to Clutterme as “the iPod of web site creation”. Clutterme offers free web hosting, as well as premium accounts and domain purchases.

Tech babble: Clutterme is written in Ruby on Rails, with a very healthy dose of JavaScript for the interface (loosely based on the Prototype library).  Development started in June 2007.

 

Best Spore Creature

Best Spore Creature was a quick weekend project in 2008, around the time when the Spore Creature Creator was released. It has since grown pretty much on its own, with very little promotion. I heard from one of the Spore developers that it made the rounds around the office around the time of the game’s release - that made me happy!

It started out as a $30 PHP script I purchased to save time. It did save me time upfront, but it proved difficult to modify and extend over time, so I ended up rewriting everything from scratch using CakePHP.

 

Cutest Bunny Picture
Cutest Ferret Picture
Cutest Chinchilla Picture
Cutest Sugargilder Picture

When I rewrote Best Spore Creature, I made it as easy as possible to create new image contest sites using the same code. I wrote some Capistrano code to deploy and manage the sites, and created four sites for animal pictures to test the waters. It takes under an hour to set up a new image contest site, including time spent looking for suitable pictures.

I haven’t spent any time promoting these sites beyond emailing a few related sites, growth has been organic.  I have a vision for steps to take these sites to the next level, but they are on the back burner for now.