David King

I've done the first bit of a launch for wrotit.com, a social site for writers inspired by reddit. (I've cross-posed this entry there, too)

Writers can get together, write articles, vote on them, get recommended reading based on past likes/dislikes, and have threaded conversations. I have the basics of the application written, and now I'm focussed on ironing out the bugs and getting a workable CSS design (any volunteers?) before I start accepting general signups (although I can give you an account if you personally email me and ask; I'd like some users for a limited beta to give suggestions and find bugs).

Simplicity is a major goal. The expected feature-list isn't that long, but eventually I'll want simple things like RSS and tags, and to have articles belong to a series. Articles are written in Markdown, although I'm still trying to make a decision as to whether to allow raw HTML or other markup languages. I hope to have a good recommendations algorithm as a way to find new content that fits a user's tastes.

Since it's a free-time project, I expect that it will be a month or two before I have a version with which to go truly "live", but I'm well on my way.

The application is written in Erlang running under Yaws. I started out using Erlyweb, but I find myself re-writing most of the framework in large chunks as I find that it just doesn't meet my needs. ErlTl isn't bad, but is missing some pretty important functionality in my book.

Erlang has proven to be a very powerful language in writing it. It's allowed me to split the application between two not-so-powerful machines (one dual-1.0ghz Via, one single-core 1.25ghz PowerPC; I'm currently hosting it out of my home-office) and still get a rather performant application. In my tests, mnesia has scaled very well for my seed data of tens of millions of entries, and I'm overall impressed by OTP and Yaws.

So this isn't a launch announcement, but it's a short preview into where I'm going with it :)