Motivation

This is some of my motivation for this product. First, a list of technical topics that I would like to gain more experience with, that I can imagine fitting into this project somehow.

• Java.
• Ant.
• Eclipse, especially its automated refactoring tools.
• How to write a web page that doesn't look like it was written a decade ago. (CSS!)
• Web pages that accept input.
• Web pages that are generated on the fly. By a trendy new language (i.e. not PHP); probably Ruby on Rails.
• XML.
• XSLT.
• RSS/Atom.
• Databases.
• FitNesse.
• Apache.
• Web services.
• Subversion.
• GUI creation and design.
• AJAX.
• DOM.

And I'd like to brush up my agile development chops in the process.

Next, a list of things that bother me about my computer usage; in this list, for "book" read "book / cd / video game / dvd".

• I give information that I'm interested in to others (e.g. book ratings to Amazon) without keeping a copy of such information myself.
• Book links in my blog are ugly, and point to an outside source.
• I'm using Windows to get at my iPod, and it's not as easy as I'd like for me to edit both its contents and the presentation of its contents.
• It would be nice to keep (and make available) a list of books that I own or have recently read.

Last modified: Sat Sep 17 12:16:02 PDT 2005