articles tagged with faqtory

Its been a while since I mentioned anything about the FAQtory app. Rest assured that, along with Bugle it’s been keeping me busy in my spare time!

To re-cap quickly, the FAQtory (pronounced Factory) is a simplified stackoverflow-like question and answer app. It allows you to Ask and Answer questions on any topic you like. The app is entirely content-focused and deliberately simple. A simple user voting mechanism ensures the most popular questions and most correct answers filter to the top.

Looking at the logs, it was last August when I kicked off the very first commit. After almost a year of on-again, off-again work and long periods of inactivity, last week finally saw it launch! In its current form the FAQtory is deployed for a single account, (pmfaqtory.com) – you can take a look here. Over time PMfaqtory intend to use FAQtory to build a resource of project management questions and answers.

This is a big milestone for me and with all features locked down for launch, I can concentrate on preparing for a general release. This will involve adding an account model, pricing options and payment gateway integration. I’ll also be moving the app to a new server stack and cloud based host.

Over the coming weeks I hope to talk more about some the design and technology decisions I have made so far. For a bit of fun, here is a replay of the Git log using the latest Gource visualisation engine (now with added ‘Bloom’ effect!)

Gource is now available on Mac Ports which is a much easier install than it used to be (again, compiling from source stills give errors on FTGL)

Just a quick update to explain what I’ve been working on lately.

Some years ago (lets say 3) I was approached by a long-time business pal. He had the idea of creating a very simple FAQ gathering web application. It would offer no other features, only questions and answers, and would provide a rich knowledge base for those working in the field of project management. Sound familiar ?

As the years passed and other projects, distractions got in the way, the FAQtory (as it was named) was put on hold. Then in September 2008, stackoverflow launched and soon after their 3rd party offering, stackexchange and following that an entire barnyard of clones; stacked, cnprog, soclone to name a few.

This was all a bit dis-heartening, given we had the idea some years ago and never jumped on it. Around Christmas last year, I picked up the FAQtory again, dusted it off and got to work in my spare time building it. Right now I am at the final stages of styling the UI and launching the first version as a sub site at pmfaqtory.com.

some notebook sketches made while designing the FAQtory

So with my attention on the FAQtory, work on Bugle has been put on hold. After the FAQtory launches however, i’ll be back developing on it again. Being a one-man show its hard to maintain a focus on more than one app at a time. Im encouraged by Rework and DHH’s concept of a little italian restaurant on the web

I’ve learnt a great deal from building these two apps and in many cases I’ve applied learning gained from experiences in one, to the other. I also have some valuable by-products I hope to share. I’ve already mentioned some on this blog and on github. So stay tuned, in future posts I’ll try to explain more of the decisions I’ve made while building each app, and hopefully get around to open sourcing more code.