Web App: Juvely

Well we are now 20 hours down the line and thinks are looking good! Practically all of the features required for launch are now in place! Anyway, before I show you what has been done I shall explain what we are building.

Rather than making a poor attempt at explaining Ill give you a copy of Jim’s spec he sent out when getting quotes:

The scenario. You and your friend spend alot of time on the internet in general (reading blogs, watching videos etc). You constantly come across new and interesting content you would like to save for later. You also find that friends with similar interests may find the sites interesting/fun. Keepsy will provide a way to store website links you find interesting/fun and want to save, it will also allow your friends to see what you save, allowing them to come across new and interesting content as well.

Upon arriving the Keepsy.com the user will be present with a short descriptive paragraph, a login form and a register button (which i will design and provide).

Once logged in the user will be able to edit their account settings and view all their latest “keepsies” (bookmarks). Every user once signed up is designated a profile page, which will look like the following ( http://upload3.net//uploads/251home.jpg). These can accessed by visiting username_of_user.keepsy.com (example jim123.keepsy.com ). Profiles can be made to be public or private. Public means anyone can access them by going to the user.keepsy.com url, private means only friends and the person themselves (once logged in) can view the profile.

The user profile will have a calender feature which will simply allow them to select a certain date, to which the page should display the keepsies (bookmarks). It will also list their friends in the form of little images (the friends profile picture, as seen on the design preview). A simple keyword search, which will search the tags + the title of each bookmark, then display the most relevant keepsies(bookmarks).

User will add the keepsies (bookmarks) by using a javascript bookmarklet (more info on bookmarklets here: https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/webdevel.html ). When on the target website, the bookmarklet will just need to be pressed once, then a small unobtrusive box will appear asking whether they would like to add tags to their submission or not. Once save is pressed, the user will continue browsing. The user will obviously need to be logged into keepsy on the computer they are using to add keepsies (bookmarks) to their profile.

We also have a couple of other features planned but we shall leave those a suprise for now.

Anyway, as I said we have got most of the features needed for launch done. Unfortunately we still have got quite a lot to do and it hasn’t helped that my boss scheduled me in to work for 8 hours over the weekend - arggg. Don’t fret though, we still plan to release by tomorrow night!

Ill leave you with a screenshot of what we have got so far (the design has changed slighty since the screenshot linked above):

Whoa no posts for two months? We have been slacking! Unfortunately over the last couple of months James and I have had loads of work to do for uni and haven’t had much chance to work on Juvely. Thinks have been progressing, slowly. The chat section is starting to take shape which is good, we planned to get loads done over the holidays but I stupidly decided to say to my boss I wouldn’t mind working every day for two weeks. Hmm. Anyway, we are both free from other commitments now so we have been pushing on with Juvely. Or we were, until it became apparent that somebody left the PSDs in Scotland…. So we decided to get started with something different.

James and I have both had a few ideas for other apps we would like to see come into life on the big wide web. Unfortunately most of them have had flaws such as being too big or not having a good enough revenue stream. The next idea we were going to try once Juvely had been finished was a simple social bookmarking site, think Delicious mixed with Twitter. I expect something similar had been done before but we decided we were going to try it anyway.

James thought it would be a good idea to have this done before Juvely to get some exposure so he looked into having someone else coding it. The best price he got would have been £200 each! He did a bit of bartering and managed to bring this down to £100 each if I do the XHTML and he does some designing for this guy later. Still, I am a bit of a cheapscate so I decided to look into it some more and thought it seemed rather simple, so I decided to give it a go!

So far I have been working on it for about 12 hours and have got most of it done. The main challenges involved relearning Ruby on Rails as I haven’t used it for so long! Still we have got quite a lot left todo but we plan on launching by the end of the year (yes I know, that is four days time, but I think we can do it!).

Ill leave you with a screenshot of our todo list so you can see how much has got to be done. Unfortunately I have got to work tonight and all day tomorrow so I won’t get any more done until Sunday. Its gonna be tight…..