Yet Another IT-related Blog

Substitutefor.com was presented the other day as a side-effect of the shocking news that the Ra-Ajax people was being sued, precautionary removing all of its files from download sections.

But that wasn’t an appropriate presentation and neither is going to be this one :-). I’ll leave that for the pt. III, you know what they say: third time lucky.

So what’s this post about? Let’s present the not-really-five-but-four objectives of this pet project.

1. Make money: Err… not really. Would have gone this way in that case.
2. Have something to blog about: Yeah, that’s important. Synergistic approach, discretia.org and substitutefor.com will benefit from each other.
3. Give a try to some web technologies I haven’t played with as a developer: I’m not a web developer, designer or whatever position related to the web but in *every* project or job that I’ve been involved I’ve had to deal with web technologies. So I guess it’s a good point.
4. Have a place to try new things, where things are either ideas, or bad ideas, or even good ideas!
5. Measure the time to market of this kind of ideas.

Some months ago I had an idea –ey that’s a great start for a post! Let’s better say that I thought one of my ideas was worth trying to make it real.

I thought about a community –what else, these days– of questions and answers around the best substitute for something. The idea was to organize them into categories and let people vote for the answers and popularity of the questions.

The idea isn’t extremely innovative, in fact it gets things from forums, ask.com, digg, stackoverflow and many more. But I started to see a lot of funny categories and uses.

In my case, it all started from the need of a substitute for a cooking util in a recipe I was trying to prepare :-). But it would be also very interesting to know who people thing would be the best substitute for Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones, or confirming the most popular substitute for sex is chocolate!

It wasn’t until February that I started working on it, since it’s only a project I can devote my spare time at home. But it’s ok, the main idea was not to have a great success but to demonstrate that it was possible to create something from an idea in the shortest period of time. I gave it my free time for three weeks and then let it apart until now, 3 months later. But this is another post, what I wanted to comment now is something that really shocked me today.

The people from Ra-Ajax, which obviously is the framework I intend to use in this project, have been sued. Apparently Thomas Hansen, one of the authors, worked beforehand for Gaiaware and they are suing him. I won’t go deeper there since I don’t have the details, but their framework has been removed from its website as precautionary measure.

Good news is, apparently I can use its Stacked platform as the base for my project with the LGPLv3 license, since I downloaded it before the measure. Phew!

By the way, this is my new project, substitutefor.com. A lot of changes are expected, but I decided to go public early as a motivational measure, after months of doing nothing related to it. Now I have an excuse also to publish a lot of interesting things here.