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If you are like me, you have probably had many ideas floating around your head for interesting websites. I thought I'd start a thread to get some of them out in the open. One thing I've found is that no matter how obscure the idea, chances are someone has explored it already to some level online, so if you post your ideas, maybe someone else will know of a site that already exists to serve that purpose.

As for motivation, I'm always interested in side projects but hate the management/admin side of things, so if your idea appeals to me in particular and wont impact my dakka work too much, then maybe I'll team up with you and will make it actually happen. Feel free to PM if you want to keep your ideas private, but public discussion is much more interesting and will develop things further. At the least we might all be able to tell you how to make it happen, or what the best avenue would be to get it created.

I'm in the fortunate position of being able to make my website thoughts into reality, so here are some of the ones I've played with over the years and what happened to them:

Audio Bootleg Trading Tools site - died out with the death of tape trading and rise of CDRs, mp3s and Torrents. I really miss this one, the tape trading community of the late 90s was amazing.

Computer parts price comparison - was unique in that it compared from all around the world, calculated taxes, credit card charges and exchange rates and then showed you the cheapest products from reputable suppliers. Was doing quite well (£100-£300 month on average) but couldnt be bothered to do the boring maintenance. Was a lesson in search engine optimisation though and I could make it a lot more successful if I relaunched it and didnt find it so boring

Fark engine - I basically made a website that allowed people to create fark-style link websites. Did not promote it in the right places and launched just before social bookmarking took off which was a vastly better solution so it died out quickly. Was able to utilise a lot of the code libraries I wrote for this on dakka though which saved a lot of time.

Community forum/gallery/wiki software - You're here right now. There is a lot of dakka specific stuff in the code so it is not portable without at least 6 months effort, but maybe one day I'll open up the full source so that others can benefit from it, if I ever finish the never ending to-do list.

So again, what would you create if you could, and what have you created and where is it now? Any crazy software dreams? If you have the next facebook-sized site in mind then please let me know

Nobody has any ideas? Or did I just make the subject look too much like spam?

My bro and I have joked about starting a million social networking sites that call for people to sign up for spam in order to get "cool features" on their pages like new categories to talk about yourself in or extra messaging capabilities. We figured we could follow the example of so many and choose the lamest names and logos possible. Blogosaurus was the big one

I'm interested in the idea of creating music. I quite like drum and bass and mixing in sounds like a quote from a tv series or the sound of a tie fighter and using existing music.

I'm quite sure there are programs out there but hows about an easy to use site for mixing music and sharing your tunes.

The logical extention of which would be a good film editing part for making videos to go with it.

I would like to see a http://www.techmeme.com/ style site for gamers. The community has enough blogs to keep such a site overflowing with new postings. I track over 500 hobby blogs in my RSS reader & have between 50-100 postings coming in per day.

Using google tools its easy to post a chronological list on a web site/blog, but I would like to go beyond a simple listing. Include teaser text, convert pictures to thumb nails, rank by popularity...

IIRC Techmeme used some sort of algorithm to select articles for their front page, only recently have they added a live editor. If a similar application was created, the only admin chore would be searching for new blog sites & adding them to the list. Hardest part would be to filter the terrible inconsistency of gamers - you never know when a blog is going to switch from 40K to cats to recipes and back to 40K.

The ideas are the hard part, writing code is easy I think part of the problem is that we (coder-types) think differently than most people. I mean, never in 100 years would I have thought that people would want some way to announce to the world what they ate for breakfast, or that they're in a checkout line, but twitter took off like wildfire...

You never know what's going to explode and what's going to implode

I've always wanted to build an ultimate 40k fansite but just never had the time, and didn't want that time wasted because GW's lawyers would just shut it down.

but my idea basically a graphicly intensive really high tech multimedia mega site that's an online codex (minus rules & point values & stuff like that) for every army out there. Each section of the site designed differently to reflect the army you're checking out. And also a huge section for modeling & painting with tutorials (video or text), galleries, new product videos, etc.

So like, you go to the site and the homepage is blog-style talking about new releases and how cool the site is. You click on space marines and you're taken to the space marines section with general vanilla marines stuff on there and info every power armor lover will want, news items about the next new marine codex and whatever. Then there's sub-sections for pretty much every official chapter out there. blood angels link takes you to the blood angels page that's skinned differently with different artwork and stuff for blood angels. Same deal for black templars or space wolves. In each chapter's sections you'll find fan-fiction-fluff, fan art, modeling & painting ideas & tutorials, army galleries (completed pics, not wip stuff that's for the modeling sections) , etc.

But then you decide you're too cool to play marines like everyone else, so you decide to check out tyranids. Same idea, tyranids homepage is like a completely different looking site designed specially for nids. Then you have links to the official hive fleets like Leviathan or Behemoth. Same idea for all the armies, even armies that are discontinued like squats, or unofficial armies like genestealer cults, etc.

The overall site would have the same basic format and layout, it's really just skins and images and content that will be changing, the only thing that would be the same throughout is a headerbar across the top.

So anyway... something like that. It'd be a massive site with fan-driven content but building a site like that is a full time job with probably no pay at all, so it's something I can't do it would also require some kind of involvement from GW because they'd never let it fly if you just did it yourself and hoped to not get sued for scanning artwork out of your codexes to decorate the site.

RanTheCid wrote:I would like to see a http://www.techmeme.com/ style site for gamers. The community has enough blogs to keep such a site overflowing with new postings. I track over 500 hobby blogs in my RSS reader & have between 50-100 postings coming in per day.

Using google tools its easy to post a chronological list on a web site/blog, but I would like to go beyond a simple listing. Include teaser text, convert pictures to thumb nails, rank by popularity...

IIRC Techmeme used some sort of algorithm to select articles for their front page, only recently have they added a live editor. If a similar application was created, the only admin chore would be searching for new blog sites & adding them to the list. Hardest part would be to filter the terrible inconsistency of gamers - you never know when a blog is going to switch from 40K to cats to recipes and back to 40K.

This is something I considered back in the early days of dakka, but the potential legal issues from GW, blogs complaining, etc made me think it not worth the effort. The blog inconsistency can be escaped by using keywords. Just from our gallery we have a list of about 2000 wargaming related words along with how they relate to each other, so it would be feasible for a random blog post to be rated as to how much 40k/fantasy/etc it contains. I didnt realise that there were quite so many hobby blogs out there though - that is quite impressive!

Necros wrote:I've always wanted to build an ultimate 40k fansite but just never had the time, and didn't want that time wasted because GW's lawyers would just shut it down.

but my idea basically a graphicly intensive really high tech multimedia mega site that's an online codex (minus rules & point values & stuff like that) for every army out there. Each section of the site designed differently to reflect the army you're checking out. And also a huge section for modeling & painting with tutorials (video or text), galleries, new product videos, etc.

So like, you go to the site and the homepage is blog-style talking about new releases and how cool the site is. You click on space marines and you're taken to the space marines section with general vanilla marines stuff on there and info every power armor lover will want, news items about the next new marine codex and whatever. Then there's sub-sections for pretty much every official chapter out there. blood angels link takes you to the blood angels page that's skinned differently with different artwork and stuff for blood angels. Same deal for black templars or space wolves. In each chapter's sections you'll find fan-fiction-fluff, fan art, modeling & painting ideas & tutorials, army galleries (completed pics, not wip stuff that's for the modeling sections) , etc.

But then you decide you're too cool to play marines like everyone else, so you decide to check out tyranids. Same idea, tyranids homepage is like a completely different looking site designed specially for nids. Then you have links to the official hive fleets like Leviathan or Behemoth. Same idea for all the armies, even armies that are discontinued like squats, or unofficial armies like genestealer cults, etc.

The overall site would have the same basic format and layout, it's really just skins and images and content that will be changing, the only thing that would be the same throughout is a headerbar across the top.

So anyway... something like that. It'd be a massive site with fan-driven content but building a site like that is a full time job with probably no pay at all, so it's something I can't do it would also require some kind of involvement from GW because they'd never let it fly if you just did it yourself and hoped to not get sued for scanning artwork out of your codexes to decorate the site.

Something similar is penciled in for (far) future dakka, but all artwork would be either commissioned or donated by artists to get around copyright problems. I've already thought of the algorithms to filter content (gallery, articles, forum posts) into dedicated home pages for each army so it is quite feasible. The biggest problem is financing - it would require two or even three servers to operate at maximum efficiency due to the heavyweight nature of analysing dynamic content as well as the cost of commissioning lots of good artwork from decent artists. The other thing that has kept me from doing it is my dislike of segregated content - I would much sooner see people scroll past stuff that doesnt interest them than never having them exposed to it in the first place.

If you look in the articles system, you can see the beginnings of this system courtesy of malfred and the other article mods - codexes summarised without background, points or stats (or other copyright violating content), along with comments on the tactical strengths and weaknesses of each unit/character.

We are slowly crawling towards what you have described, but are in no hurry to get there


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Oh and redbeard, totally agree. Twitter and facebook have taught me that the general population hate privacy and love attention more than I even thought possible.

I always thought about a website devoted to pooling ideas for websites. Or one about making forts from bacon. Now I'm hungry again.

Ahtman, you should have googled:
http://www.coolwebsiteideas.com/
http://baconfort.com/ (even if they dont have anything, the domain is already taken :( )

If your goal is to make monies, and not benefit society in any way at all, you have to come up with the next facebook-enabled clicky game (like farmville).

I'm not actually sure if this is relevant. It's a website I'm toyed with on and off for the last several years, and began as a combined information/learning exercise. It certainly has and continues to push my CSS skills.

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a35/morgrimmoon/Untitled.jpg (Linked for minor screen-stretchiness)

Basically, a site giving guidelines for roleplaying various unusual weapons. Each listed weapon has a description as it would be used in a rp, a bit about how it works, where the idea has originated and then a separate section giving tips on what sort of character and skills would be needed to rp it effectively. That image is to a slightly older version, the current one is in php but my computer won't properly display it as I don't have a server. When I get a job I need to get a host so I can put it live again, my last host sort of died.

The problem is there doesnt seem to be many original ideas for websites anymore, they're all basically gone.

For my major practical assignment we had to create the internet and make our own websites with mail service (which had to interract with the other groups), forum and stuff like that. Being kind of lazy I don't think I would bother to make another website after the maintenance aspect became annoying over time. Basically we got small problems over time that became increasingly annoying to overcome. But, that might also be because we had to do it in one day, then restart it from scratch the next day (We had specific tasks for the project and had to take turns doing each one).

We had to have a Web Server, Exchange Server, File Server, Proxy Server and the Domain controller linked to a firewall linked to a router which was connected to another router which then went out to the other groups to create the small version of the internet (Which was also connected to the actual internet, we occasionally got spambots on the forums as well. They weren't part of the task). Because they had to be turned off everyday many problems would show up over time, and when they were shutdown it would have to be done in a specific order to prevent it from stuffing up heaps.

So I appreciate the work that goes into keeping the sites that I like to visit working. It's annoying to get going, but once it works it's pretty good.