Tien Chiu

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Starting to take shape

In the last two days I’ve written 13 pages of specs for the social network project (don’t look too impressed: two of those pages are the table of contents!).  There are still a lot of gaps but the basic framework is starting to take shape.

There are six basic kinds of “objects” (information-collections, or (I think) nodes in Drupal) in the site.  They are:

  • profiles (of registered users)
  • galleries (of projects belonging to a particular user or group)
  • projects (each project belongs to a registered user, and can (optionally) be associated with a group)
  • yarns (with all the data of the associated yarn)
  • patterns/drafts (ditto)
  • user group profiles
  • (possibly) looms

These are the basic building blocks (‘nodes” in Drupal, I think) and will be able to link to each other and be cross-referenced, as in Ravelry.

Yarn and patterns will be part of a “database”, that is to say you can “link to” a yarn or pattern as you would with Ravelry, thus enabling users to find all projects using a particular pattern/draft (or a particular yarn) quickly.  I am not yet certain whether this will fly (it relies on search capabilities that I”m not sure exist in Drupal).  But the advantages of having a yarn database, instead of having users enter the yarn information every time, are twofold: (1) searching is better and more reliable, since you don’t have to worry about losing projects with typos in the yarn name, and (2) it makes the process of entering yarn information much less tedious, by autopopulating your yarn information once you select a yarn.

As I’ve said, I’m not sure whether I can implement this in Drupal, but I’ll give it a try.  I want a similar database for patterns, and also possibly (not sure yet – this may be a future feature) for looms.

In addition to that, there will also be forums – one main set of forums with volunteer moderators, plus a forum for each group.  Forums are easily set up in Drupal, so this shouldn’t take long.

Functionality in addition to the core functionality listed above will include:

  • (nice to have) the ability to tag other people’s work as “favorites”
  • (nice to have) the ability to message other users
  • (nice to have) individual user blogs

That’s it for now.  I realize that Ravelry has lots of other cool features, but this is already a (highly!) ambitious project for a Drupal novice.  I arrived at this by cutting down everything I could think of until I reached the point where I couldn’t cut further.  Then I added a few “free” (easy-to-implement) features back in, like groups, forums, and possibly user blogs.

Later this morning I will go see someone about enlarging my sectional beam so I can back to work on doubleweave.  This social network project is interesting (and extremely exciting!), but I’m starting to suffer weaving withdrawal and could really stand to get my hands on some yarn!

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Writing specs; knitting to weave

I am stymied in my attempts to weave doubleweave until I can get the wood pieces to enlarge my sectional beam, so I am working on other projects for the time being.  (I have called a woodworker about it, but they haven’t called me back yet; I’ll do another round of phone calls on Monday.)

I have done some more investigation into Drupal, and am frustrated by the steep learning curve and the poor documentation of most of the modules.  So I have found myself a Drupal expert who will go through my specs and translate them into Drupal architecture, give me a list of modules to use and some basic instructions, and let me work on it from there.  She isn’t too expensive, which is good, since this is a pro bono project on my part and my budget for it is strictly limited.  This is exactly the kind of help I need!

Of course, the downside is that now I have to write specs.  This is a fairly complex project, on par with the contract job I did for Balsam Hill.  The spec for that site is 20-30 pages long, and there are at least 10-15 pages of wireframes.  Not un-do-able, just takes time.  So I better get to work on it.  I need Visio and am working on buying it through a friend who is a full-time student (academic pricing).  Meanwhile it’s pen, paper, and use cases.  Not the most exciting thing to do, but (speaking as a professional project manager here) if you don’t have a concrete idea of what you want to build, you’re doomed.

B. and I are going on a long ride today, 50-60 miles, but after that I hope to get to work.

In other news, I thought of an interesting idea for weaving.  Take a machine knitted blank (rectangle of knitted fabric), dye it, and then use it in weaving.  If you time it so that the unraveled yarn in each row is the same as the length of the weft for each row, you could conceivably get painted-weft effects that would be really neat.

As with everything under the sun, however, this idea is not original.  There’s a woman in the East Bay doing just that, and offering custom knitted blanks for sale.  This intrigues me; I’d like to pursue it further, but I should live so long as to do everything I’d like to do.  I’m back-burnering it for now, but keeping it on tap should I decide to do interesting warp-and-weft painted effects.  Painted horizontal stripes!  Now that’s a cool idea.

So many cool things to do, so little time!

Finally, I have received and accepted a job offer from Electrotank, and given notice at my old company.  What a relief!  I will start there in two weeks.

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Ravelry for weavers

You may recall that at the end of last year, I was interested in creating a Ravelry-equivalent for handweavers. I had thought about it, checked out a couple of content management systems, and in general was pretty gung-ho about it, except for one thing: I was NOT willing to maintain and administer it long-term. A six month commitment to build out a community website is one thing, but spending the rest of my life settling bulletin-board squabbles, managing users, etc. was not something I wanted to do – would take too much time away from weaving, cycling, and my other interests! So I let it be.

<time passes>

This morning, out of the blue, I got an email from Syne Mitchell, editor of WeaveZine. A woman named Claudia had emailed her about the possibility of setting up a weaving Ravelry, and was I still working on the project? I said no, it was back-burnered, but if someone was willing to do the administration and manage it long-term, I would love to set it up.

So Claudia and I have been corresponding and it seems likely that I will be working on creating a Ravelry-equivalent for weavers fairly soon, like within the next few months. Which will be good for me since it will give me experience in creating social networking/community sites and dealing with content management systems like Drupal, both of which are hot stuff on a resume. Also it will allow me to contribute something back to the handweaving community, which has been extremely supportive and helpful to me as a weaving novice.

This is going to be a huge project, so I need to clear the decks first. Which means moving forward as soon as possible with my “redo the website” project. Fortunately I have found someone to help me migrate the website, so as soon as my job situation stabilizes (hopefully in the next day or two) I can have her start work. Equally fortunately, I can parallel process this with my doubleweave studies – I wouldn’t want to give those up!

If you know of anyone else who might be interested in helping found a Ravelry equivalent for weavers, please let me know. I’m particularly interested in anyone with a technical background and/or experience with Drupal, but I’ll need help with beta testers and other nontechnical stuff too.

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24 shafts!

Someone in the Bay Area just posted a 24-shaft AVL Workshop Dobby Loom for sale on the weaving mailing lists!  I’ve been hoping to find a used one for ages, so I pounced on it and am going to go see it this evening.  If it works well, I’ll buy it and pick it up probably the 2nd week of August, which will give me time (if I hurry) to get my current project woven off before the AVL arrives.

It’ll be nice to have 24 shafts, and AVLs are reportedly the Cadillac of looms.  The Workshop Dobby Loom is notorious for problems in setup – I have one friend who is just about ready to send hers back to AVL – but this one seems to be OK.  At least, the owner says she’s woven several things successfully on it.

Anyway, I’m really excited about this – I’ve wanted an AVL WDL for awhile, and 24 shafts will have more room for playing around than 16 (weave letters, imagery, etc.) – so I really hope this works out.

In other news, I have almost finished writing the pseudocode for the PHP/MySQL project, which means soon it’ll be time to start coding.  I nearly gave up in frustration and despair last night – I know so little about PHP and MySQL that every line required going to look four or five things up – but woke up this morning with renewed determination.  Now that I have (almost completely) worked out the logic, I can start looking up syntax.  Moral of the story: if a problem seems overwhelming, break it down until it makes more sense.

B. has also been instrumental in helping, having pointed out that linked lists make more sense than using an absolute position for my queue items.