Ok, I have a weekend project! It's been a while since I've had a small project I can hack out in a short period of time (listfoo was probably the last one, and that sucker took like two weeks or something).

So the idea I have is a site called swarmf. The 'f' is silent (because swarm.com was taken) and stands for "f-uck you domain squatters for taking all the good domain names".

The idea of this site is to allow an organizer to create a page about a topic that he can share with other users. The organizer organizes links and images (and can annotate them with notes) and organizes the page. A very simple concept.

The more specific scenario I have involves my inability to keep up with current events. I read somewhere that a Congressman is embroiled in a sexual scandal. How do I quickly find out about this topic? The short answer is that it's pretty tough to do that. You can browser Technorati (if it's working) for all relevant blog posts, but that's time consuming. Wikipedia tends to be pretty quick (WikiNews too), but editing those is not easy, and they're not under control.

In a sense, the organizer becomes the "expert" on the topic and displays links that match his/her point of view. Opinions are always slanted, so I'm not trying to fix this problem. If someone is obviously biased, somebody else will create a swarm page with the counterpoint.

The system will also store snapshots of each page over time, so you can see the evolution of annotations/notes/links on a given topic. For something like Hurricane Katrina, it could provide a really nice entrypoint for people to see what's happening.

So it's a very simple idea. I won't get into the details right now. I registered the domain, and I'm setting up the server stuff now. I'm going to start scripting out the site. My goal is to get the basic functionality done by Saturday night (since I still have to work at my job tomorrow). I'll work out design issues Sunday morning and hopefully by Sunday night I'll have the launch.

Edit @ 2:42AM: Domain name registered, nameservers updated, pointing to my DNS host, and DNS host is pointing to my server, which has the account set-up. Woot.

Edit @ 3:30AM: Got the database structure up. It's pretty simple, a lot of serialized data going in there cause I'm lazy. I've decided to use Pear's DB module and a Pear Sessions module so I don't have to deal with that crap. I'm going to write a quick wrapper for the DB module cause I hate handwriting SQL. Once this site's done, I'll release it under the WTFPL license (assuming that this doesn't conflict with the Pear modules, I'm assuming not).

Edit @ 4:24AM: Spent the last hour fussing with my Mac, getting PHP, Pear, and mySQL all set-up so I can do all this work locally. Getting pretty tired, I gotta get at least 4 hours of sleep for work tomorrow... unless I take a vac day...

Edit @ 5:20AM: Database query generator done. Pear::DB looks like a decent way tot handle DB connections, so I'll use that.

Edit @ 7:00AM: Christ, I need to get a few hours of shut-eye before work. Maybe I'll just take a vac day today. I started coding the User library; I'm mostly just getting familiar with the PEAR libraries. Things are looking good.