With this post I'm starting a new kind of article: WE programming project. It's objective is to give ideas of programs that could be written over a WE, probably a lot more or lot less depending on your skill and willing to extend the idea.
Here is the first project proposal: an XKCD keyword index.
Objective
You probably known XKCD, "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language". If not, I recommend it's reading. :-) All the XKCD comics are freely available, through an URL, e.g. "Asteroid" is available at URL https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/asteroid.png.
Sometimes, I would like to illustrate a slide or blog item with one of XKCD comics. I know it exists, I saw it but I can no longer find it! So frustrating! So the main idea of this WE programming project is rather simple: make a keyword index of XKCD comics so that one could look for a comics over a theme or idea.
Requirements
Here is some requirements for this project, feel free to adapt to your needs or your own ideas: ;-)
- It is a web site on the Internet that displays each XKCD comics (with proper reference to original web site) with associated keywords
- One can search comics on a set of keywords
- One can associate keywords (
a-z-
character set, space separated list) to a given comics - Already given keywords are suggested
- No need of account by default, everybody is free to add new keywords (for easy contribution)
- Moderators (with dedicated account) can make previously added keywords public, can remove keywords
- No use of database (for easy installation), keywords are saved into a simple file
- One can download the whole association of keywords to comics (e.g. as a JSON data structure)
- There is an API to control the web site (for use by others and integration into other sites)
Needed programming technology
Any programming language you want which have a well designed web framework: Ruby with Rails, Python with Django, Javascript with Meteor, OCaml with Ocsigen, ...
If you tackle this project proposal, let me know! ;-)