Subject: Re: ProjectPM: Do you need me for anything? |
From: Joe Neal <vlvtelvis@speakeasy.net> |
Date: 6/23/10, 04:02 |
To: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> |
On Saturday, June 19, 2010 03:29:54 pm you wrote:
Hi, Joe-
Finally have a chance to get back to you on those questions; sorry again
for the delay.
The software on which both the media and legislative network was to be run
was being written by a colleague of mine in XMPP as a sort of side project
to something he was doing in his spare time. A few weeks ago he informed me
that, in fact, his project won't actually support the simple capabilities
I had asked for; as of now, the new plan entails getting a couple of guys
who have already volunteered to write a basic version, as well as
recruiting a few more coders as necessary. If you'd be interested in
getting involved on that front, I'd be happy to provide a share of any
funds we bring in - we're in the process of preparing grant applications
now. Of course, you'd probably want to know more before committing
yourself; feel free to give me a ring. As for your other questions:
*1. What is ProjectPM at the software level? What language is it written
in?
What database does it use?*
As I noted above, XMPP was going to be the language, but now we're open to
anything. I don't have the expertise to make any decisions in that regard
but I'm going to be talking to a couple of people we've brought on this
week about that.
This just weird. XMPP is Jabber. It's an open messaging protocol. This is
like saying you were going to base it on AIM or Yahoo messenger, though you
can do some other things with it. I tried to use it for the backend for a
webchat once and gave up and went with a proprietary solution instead. It's
not a language or database format or anything like that though. The code was
not going to be written in XMPP. It's a protocol, like HTTP. You can write
HTTP clients and servers in a number of languages to do a number of different
things and likewise with XMPP. I just don't get it.
I have absolutely no idea what was intended here.
*4. Where are you going to host the thing? Are you going to try and run it
on
a shared web host and hope they don't rape you for CPU use if you ever get
popular? I couldn't get an answer from you on this earlier and it
concerned me because it leads me up to question 5*
*
*
The nature of the project is such that, aside from an informational website
that is unlikely to get heavy traffic, the actual content will simply be
hosted on the blogs of our participant bloggers.
OK, I understood the nature of the project to be that you were going to start
something like an open group blog where all the content was going to be housed
or at least displayed on a centralized website. I'm fundamentally
misunderstanding the nature of the project.
*5. Do you know what the fuck you are doing? In our prior email exchanges
you
didn't seem to know the difference between a web host and a DNS host. That
concerned me greatly and alone almost made me write the whole thing off.
I'm not well-informed on the specifics of servers and hosting, but we have
people who are. I would indeed be interested in having you handle the
website for us in exchange for a portion of any money we bring in, although
it will be another week at least before I can make a final decision on
that.
OK, I can do that but I'm not exactly real sure what the website is going to
contain. My current impression is that it will be a stand-alone blogroll
*6. Who's on your tech / coding team so far and what have they put
together? If you want you can put me in touch with them and let us get up
to speed and we'll inform you of where I can fit in.*
I guess this was answered above; originally, we just had one guy doing it,
but he's proven not to be useful to us, so we now have to check into the
viability of gathering a couple more volunteers to compose the basic
software versus having someone such as yourself do it in exchange for some
form of compensation.
Once I understand exactly what the software requirements are, feel free to put
me in touch with the people you've got working on it.