RelationCraft

I haven't blogged for a week because I've been working hard on RelationCraft, my website.

RelationCraft is a new type of social networking site for college students that is focused on relationships. The name can mean that you go on the site to craft your relationships, and it is also a bit of a pun (RelationCraft instead of Relationship -- a ship is a type of craft).

Here is a timeline of the site's progress:

October-November: Brainstorming. The general idea occurred to me in October, and for a month and a half I was compiling a big Word document of ideas.

December: Designing. I consolidated the brainstorm down to a list of ideas to implement in the initial release of the site, then I filled up about a dozen sheets of paper with sketches of the site layout.

January: Learning. I started off with a good general knowledge about HTML and HTTP, but I had never done any web programming before. I decided to use ASP.NET for the site because I already have experience with Microsoft .NET and I think it is an awesome development environment. The IDE of Visual Studio 2005 is the smartest in human history.

     The experience was frustrating at first. It is a fascinating paradigm shift to be using the same kind of high-level programming language for a web application as for a Windows application. But because this web application is so complex, there were a lot of minor details about the way ASP.NET works that I had to get used to. I wasted many hours on relatively trivial problems because I only had one friend who knew more about this than I did.

February: Programming. After a slow start, I finally got the hang of ASP.NET, and I was amazed that some of the more complex implementation ideas I was dreaming of (asynchronous server interaction through HTML frames) were realistic. ASP.NET is a truly powerful rapid development solution. So I registered the domain name RelationCraft.com and signed up for hosting with GoDaddy. (Unfortunately, because the site is for college students only, it enforces the registration requirement that you must have an email address from an approved college. I'll post information about demoing the site in the future.)

March: Well, I'm still programming, but I am a few days away from having a polished demo site with a few initial features. I realize I haven't actually described any innovative ideas from the site yet, and I don't really feel like typing them up right now, so just check out some preliminary screenshots.