As previously mentioned, I had this crazy idea for a ProveIt submission: Design a blogging system for all UMBC users in order to let every person write about topics they are passionate about, without having to fill their blogs with other topics they don't really care too much about to achieve popularity.
Well, after several days, I now present you with The Gritz/Fetch Design Document, Version 1.0
In case you're wondering, Gritz/Fetch is the working title for the system I propose. Without going into too much detail (the design document elaborates really well on this, no need to repeat myself), the system works as follows:
Gritz
is the part of the system the user uses to write new articles. Gritz also manages the display of individual blogs, serving up content for each user. If you want to write something or view one person's blog, you use Gritz.Fetch
aims to minimize the one true weakness of a blog: obscurity. Everytime a user writes a new post, it is submitted to Fetch, along with information about its category and content. Fetch works primarily with articles published using Gritz, but simple standardization (RSS) allows the majority of other blog systems (Livejournal, Xanga, Blogspot, Wordpress, etc.) to be included in the Fetch list.
Anyway, check out the design document, tell me what you think. The abstract is the really important part, that should make sense to everybody. The structure is more technical, but the few people I've shown it to so far haven't had any trouble getting the general idea from that section.
If you're interested in this project, please let me know. To qualify for a ProveIt submission, I need at least two more people to be responsible for implementation (these have to be tech-savvy people), but even if you don't want to commit that much, I could always use your support. Give me your feedback, any thoughts, etc.
I've recently started reading UMBC Underground, and after reading this article, I came up with the crazy idea of providing all students with free blogging software, namely blosxom, which I'm using on this very blog. It's not that hard to manage, because there are no databases or anything complex like that, but it is very simple to expand and modify, if you know what you're doing.
Here's the bottom line: If OIT provided a blogging infrastructure for students, with a global aggregation system, collecting posts from all blogs campus-wide and presenting them in a concise format, would you use it? Would you post to a blog and share your opinions on campus life and what's going on?
I ask because I'm seriously considering this for a ProveIt! submission.
