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.

Mike 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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Enlarging my sectional beam, and other stuff

After some consultation with various weavers and with AVL, I’m going to try building up the back beam rather than try to put warp separators in each section.  The reason is pretty simple: I don’t believe that the warp separators will solve the problem.  Put over the knots, they’ll stick up unevenly and most likely tilt to one side or another (although Kathy did have the excellent idea of using curved slats from window blinds), and it will be hard to get the sections to match up exactly.  At least, that’s what I think – I haven’t tried it so I don’t really know.

The problem can be seen pretty clearly in this photo:

Sectional beam on my AVL Workshop Dobby Loom
Sectional beam on my AVL Workshop Dobby Loom

The measuring tape is to give you a sense of scale, and the piece of wood resting on the groove shows how shallow the groove is.  I’ve measured it and it’s only about 1/4″ deep at the deepest part!  No wonder the knots are sticking up out of the groove!  This is going to be a problem with virtually every warp I put on unless I fix it.

So, I plan to enlarge the warp beam somewhat by putting wood strips under the four pieces of the sectional beam (the wood parts with wire hoops sticking up from them).  If I remove the wooden pieces (which is easy to do with a screwdriver), I should be able to put 1/2″ strips of wood underneath, and then attach the wooden pieces of the sectional beam on top of those strips.  This will make the groove significantly deeper.

The only downsides to this plan are (a) it will put more torque on the screws attaching the sectional beam to the metal core of the beam (which may or may not be a problem; guess I’ll find out!), and (b) I don’t have a ready source for 1.25″ wide strips of 1/2″ thick wood.  But this is a very solvable problem; I’ve asked AVL for a quote on custom-making it for me, and if that doesn’t work, I’m sure there are any number of handymen on Craigslist who would be happy to help.  The Beatles were incorrect in saying “All you need is love” – in this case, all you need is a table saw.  🙂

So that’s the loom story.  I have also ordered a few more heddles to bring my total number of heddles up to 2400 (100 per shaft) – that’s probably overkill, but I hate moving heddles around and I’ll need quite a few heddles for the doubleweave project.  Also more of the U-shaped wire thingies to turn the sectional beam into 1″ rather than 2″ sections.

I have also written up the requirements definition for the first round of the weavers’ social networking site (not hard since I did an earlier version of it a few months ago) and have sent it to a developer friend who is more familiar with Drupal than I am, to see whether he thinks I can build this site in Drupal.  I think the answer is “yes” but I’m hoping he can give me a quick walkthrough of how to set things up in Drupal.  I need one; I’ve been playing around with it today but mostly succeeding in getting myself confused.

I also need to sit down and do the wireframes for the pages – gotta define stuff before you can create it!

Finally, I think I’ve decided to accept the job offer.  It’s not perfect by any means, but it is an opportunity to try telecommuting, which I think is interesting enough to try.  If it doesn’t work out, well, move on.

Now that that decision is past me, I can return to normal life.  Or what passes for normal, anyway.

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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.