My Proudest Moment for KiwiWriters
In all the work that I've done in getting the KiwiWriters site up and going this year, I have just finished the thing that I am most proud of.
Finally, after many months of wrangling, I have pretty much wrapped up the Challenge section of the site. So let's look at the stages I had to go through to make it happen:
- I needed to do a quick release so we could use it for The 6,000 Word Easter Challenge and prove the concept and implementation
- that initial release did pretty well and not much was changed to be able to add SoCNoC 2007 not long afterwards
- at the same time, I added the lovely participation icons and the progress bars for anyone that wants them
- since then, I've added the ability to choose your timezone and have the challenge work with your local time
- I've just released updated code to actually use it :-)
- next will be a script to log everyone's daily progress to the database
- soon that will also be reported on the site
- added to all this, the admin interface to add/edit/delete new events
- plus finally, the ability for the members to add their own events
So already there is quite a lot but the other thing I really like is that the challenges can be of many different types - not just word counting. I think it is an uber-cool feature that we wanted from the start and I'm very happy with the implementation being all nice and data-driven.
It seems other challenge-based writing sites put all their effort into one challenge a year, which to me, also sounds like manual-database-editing overhead-hell. Being someone who hates restrictions and one of the most important requirements for KiwiWriters as a group was to have the ability to stage many challenges throughout the year and the ability to let members create their own.
So I/we made it multi-evented from the start and now it's blossoming into it's own little world. Soon we will have even more challenges:
- The Zing Thing Challenge
- The End is Nigh Challenge
...not to mention lots more when we release the 'member' challenge section.
As always, what are you waiting for, Join Us!
This post originated on http://chilts.org/.
Email me on andychilton -at- gmail -dot- com.