the chatterböxen story

I have just launched the beta of Chatterböxen, my ephemeral, anonymous chat program (with tightened-up graphics). Chatterböxen began as a simple attempt to create an AJAX chat with jQuery, but quickly evolved into the current look and feel, with words and phrases floating in a bright white space.

I developed the very first incarnation while I was working at VSA a couple of years ago, and wrote it in PHP with a MySQL backend to store the messages. This was fun to show to a few friends by hardly efficient enough for the big-time, and it was also extremely buggy and susceptible to hacker attacks. I showed it to some coworkers and a few friends and then shelved it.

As part of my new years resolution to bring all of my side projects online, I began working on chatterböxen again a few weeks ago, as a ruby on rails project. It was very effective and easy to write that way, but it was too bulky. Rails is a wonderful framework for a lot of different kinds of website, but it's far too complicated for something like this. I had just learned about the Sinatra framework, which runs with Rack and a few other libraries to produce super simple, one-file web applications. I'd seen a blog implemented with Sinatra in less than a couple hundred lines and I was intrigued.

Rewriting Chatterböxen in Sinatra turned out only to take a single afternoon, ajax bells and whistles and all. A few further refinements, and now I am officially announcing that it is in beta and y'all should all go look at it and poke around for a few minutes. Within the next day or two I should have an improved backend solution implemented, and an FAQ on the site for people who are confused or having issues. Also, there is a facebook page! Despite my own reservations about it, this is a thing and it is happening. Go check it out, space cadets.

Some New Sites

For your webernetting pleasure, I have launched three websites last week: one for my portfolio and two side projects.

Seeninchicago.com is a photo sharing site with an emphasis on the geography of Chicago, dreamt up by my friend Sarah and me. There's the possibility of a national or international launch later, but for now it's just interesting stuff that people have seen in the city of Chicago. It's still very much a work in progress so be nice and keep checking back to see what kinds of cool stuff we come up with.

Fortunator, currently residing at dangerouscuteness.com is an experiment to see how varied the fortunes in fortune cookies are. If you have fortunes to enter in, please do so and, once I've added support for it, tell me where you got them. The eventual idea is to be able to connect chinese food restaurants across the country using the fortunes they offer. Stay tuned for some support for geocoding and possibly reviews.

My design and development portfolio is now available at max.dangerouscuteness.com. It's still incomplete but some of the more significant stuff from my portfolio can be found there. I'll be adding more to it soon, too.