Pledge4Code is Online!

I'm pleased to announce that Pledge4Code.com is now online! You can now enjoy my beautiful graphics, John's code, and submit your ideas for awesome programs. Oh, and you can sign up to be notified of stuff -- although you might as well just watch our blogs. And...well, you can't really do much more than that -- yet!

The roadmap for the site is pretty simple:

1. First, we want to let people submit and rate ideas.
2. Then, we'll choose the best ideas and write some formal specifications.
3. Finally, we'll start seeking people to pledge for the code!

Obviously, there's no guarantee that anything will happen, but such is the case for every company that hasn't found its market yet. Currently, Pledge4Code.com is targeting developers, but anywhere where there's a distributed need for software, we have an opportunity. Personally, I'm looking forward to building a useful and neat-looking frontend (Javascript included), so stay tuned...

I also recently managed to get Git working. Git is a fast and flexible distributed version control system. Like Subversion or CVS, it keeps track of all the changes you make to a project, and lets multiple people work on a given project simultaneously. Pledge4Code.com uses Git to manage the Web site source code. Trouble is: Git was made for Linux, meaning I had to use Cygwin (Linux in Windows) to use it. Since our setup uses public keys for security, I generated a key pair with ssh-keygen -- only to find out it didn't work. The problem is: Cygwin has two home directories, and you have to put your SSH keys in /home/(username)/.ssh/, not at ~/.ssh/ as I thought. After about an hour of trouble, I managed to get the key working. And now, I just need to set up a server. That's for next time...

By the way, I have a bunch of blogs that are just sitting around, waiting to be published. I need to run them by some people before they go online. So sit tight...it hopefully won't be that long...