Alan Quatermain

So, I had this little idea before Christmas. I’d been playing with Rails 3.0, and wanted to put something together with that. It occurred to me that I would quite like there to be a site where I could go to find long-form information on particular programming topics. As a (prospective, at least) writer, I’d quite like to put my articles somewhere they’re likely to be seen by more than the couple of hundred people who happen to like my waffling enough that they’ll follow me on Tumblr. And I’d also like to be able to easily take a bunch of articles I’ve written and compile or revise them to publish in electronic and/or dead-tree formats.

The more I thought of this, the more it grew, and the more promising it became.

It would be a publishing avenue for writers published and unpublished, new and old. Experienced authors writing for the site could assist younger or less-experienced ones with editorial skills. Users would be able to make use of (for want of a better term) ‘social’ features, where they could subscribe to feeds from their favourite writers or subjects. There could be means for people to put in requests for specific topics they’d like to see covered, or with problems they’d like to see solved in detail. Any writer could choose one of these topics and write about it if they so chose.

Additionally, we’d have something akin to a traditional publishing house. An author with a number of articles on a related subject could choose to compile those into a book. The editors of the site could publish compilations of the best articles (overall, by language/topic/etc.). The site would operate in a non-profit manner, obtaining its running fees through a small portion of book sales and through advertising, but virtually all money from the sale of books would go to the book’s author(s).

Now, I’ve got a name for this thing, I’ve got a domain, and I’ve got hosting lined up. I’ve even got the very beginnings or a Rails project. What I don’t have is either an appropriate amount of time to create it all myself (at least not right now) nor any sort o design ability. I can picture what I’d broadly like to see, but I’m damned if I can put that onto paper or screen.

So consider this a tentative call to arms. This project could use a few collaborators, to perform such functions as:

• Rails development. Yes, I want Rails, because I want to gain experience in it from this, and because I know enough to help out somewhat.
• Design. Masters of CSS and HTML, Photoshop and Illustrator.
• Javascript. I’d like our writing kit to include some relatively easy-to-use slideshow or motion graphics stuff, so a nice Javascript API that we could use in an RJS generator would be awesome.
• Writers. Oh yes, we’ll definitely be needing some writers. If you’ve got some existing material, we’d like to know if you would consider posting some of it to this new site. If so, we’d want to come up with some nice conversion routines, because that would be very very useful, especially in the event that folks would like to publish on their own sites first, then on this site a little later on through an automated process.

So that’s where it stands. Who likes this idea? Who would like to help make it a reality? It goes without saying that I’m primarily interested in people who can show experience when it comes to putting the site together. As far as writers are concerned, we’ll probably start out in a similar fashion to help build a reputation for quality content.

If you’d like to help in any way (and remember, this is all non-profit) please let me know what you can do: