Posts tagged projects

A few factors convened recently to bring my latest project to life:

• I realised that I have more ideas than I could ever build myself
• Richard Price - who shares many ideas with his Facebook friends - helped me realise that the advantages of sharing ideas (discussion, criticism, someone else building it) could outweigh the disadvantages (someone else building it)
• Guy has been sitting on an awesome domain name for years
• I needed an app to demonstrate the basic functionality of Rat (a PHP framework I’m developing)
• I had a couple of days to kill. It was Thanksgiving weekend and I was in San Francisco. I had a wonderful dinner with a friend but there followed a couple of days when everyone seemed to be out of town.
• I wanted to deploy my first application in the cloud

And so, PleaseBuildThis.com was born.

I’m going to use it to share my ideas and hopefully collect feedback and get some indication of demand too. It will also be a testbed for developing Rat.

I believe that sharing ideas like this could become an interesting new method of self-expression. Imagine investors browsing PleaseBuildThis.com profiles to learn more about the people they are about to invest in and find out how they think about the world.

I hope you’ll join me in trying it out!

On a recent trip, I realised there’s no easy way to plot your route on a map as you travel. My fellow traveller Tom and I each developed a solution to this problem…

Tom used a Garmin eTrex GPS device. The device was left on during the day and then plugged into a laptop regularly to download the data. The device didn’t come with a USB cable so Tom made one out of a cut-down credit card with contacts fashioned out of copper wire. He then used EasyGPS to download the data. The Garmin’s batteries needed replacing each day. The resulting data was very accurate - the line accurately following each curve of our journey. Tom exported the data from EasyGPS into a Google Fusion table which allows for easy conversion into a Google Map. You can see Tom’s map here.

My solution was to build a mobile web app for my iPhone. It consists of a map with a ‘Check-in’ button. Each night I pressed the ‘Check-in’ button which added a new waypoint and extended the line. A bit like a lo-fi version of RunKeeper. The result was a rather jagged line that still gives a good impression of our progress each day. I called my app TripMap.it and you can now use it yourself. You can also see my map here.

Tom and I are both keen to improve our maps (by incorporating photos etc.) however I wanted to write about TripMap now just in case it’s useful to you or anyone you know who is going on a trip soon. Please get in touch and let me know what you think!

There’s a cool startup based in Newcastle called Happiest. The premise of their product is that if you practice the seven happy habits every day then you will be a happier person. The seven happy habits are: gratitude, eating healthily, connecting with wisdom, getting active, meditation, repeating a mantra and keeping a journal.

I’ve been beta testing their handsome web app for a few months now and it works nicely. They have big plans for the product but one worry I have at the moment is the lack of encouragement to post updates. I’m sure the team will find ways to increase engagement in due course however, in the meantime, I had a little crack at the problem myself.

I created a Twitter bot - called @HapBot - that simply says “well done” each time you tweet one of the happy habits. You can easily post your Happiest updates to Twitter or you can use it independently by using the right hashtags. It tweets instructions at you when you start following it. It also suggests which habit to try completing next and gives you a special ‘happy day’ tweet when you complete every habit in one day.

Unlike many other Twitter bots @HapBot is entirely opt-in: it only tweets at its followers so you can stop receiving tweets at any time simply by unfollowing. It has already gathered 40 followers, rewarded 400 tweets and logged 30 ‘happy days’. Active users so far include @EmmaRoseR, @mynameiscolin and, one of the Happiest team, @alexhorre - thanks guys!

Do check out Happiest and then give @HapBot a whirl and let me know what you think.