philcrissman.com

I began building a new project tonight, which I’m calling “microlinks,” at least for the time being. It will be a live experiment in building a simple web application for myself, and also an experiment in online advertising and internet marketing. Microlinks will be an online advertising solution; it will start out as simple as can be, and I suppose I’ll see what happens from there.

Does the world really need yet another form of web marketing? Well, seeing as how I’m not even ready for an alpha test, let alone a beta test, I don’t think I can answer that. The prudent, market-oriented, answer would be, if no one is interested, it will quietly and sadly fall by the wayside. Enough said.

Regardless of the actual success or failure of the venture, I look forward to the experience of building a usable web application from start to finish. Since I’ve already done a little development with Rails, I opted to use that as a platform.

I’ve been using vim as my editor, and I may yet return, but I decided to give TextMate a try with its 30-day trial, and see how I like it. It is a commercial product, not extremely expensive, but it will have to be pretty impressive in order to keep me using it after the 30-day trial expires; I suppose I’ll have to write a review of the editor sometime in the next 30 days. We shall see.

Lastly, I’ll be using subversion for the first time. Well, not the first time ever “using” it, but the first time using it for a project of my own. That in itself should be a valuable experience, as any future project of sufficient size or complexity will certainly also warrant some form of version control; subversion is by no means the only solution, but it seems to be a prevalent one, especially in Open Source circles.

If you’re interested in partaking in the initial beta test, when it’s ready, just keep an eye on this site or its RSS feed.