VillageMind.com

Our first site in the VillageMind network, tinyCritic, has just been launched to beta!

We are very excited about this site and are working hard to bring it to a full public launch in the near future. tinyCritic is designed for finding and writing brief and to-the-point reviews in 50 words or less on a variety of media and products. We believe that sometimes hearing several short opinions about something from a variety of viewpoints can be more valuable than reading one long form review from one viewpoint. Additionally, the word limit forces a reviewer to distill their opinion to a few points that they feel are most important to express — without the time investment a longer review would require. One of our inspirations for the project has been Twitter, and we believe that writing a review of a movie you have just seen should be as quick and easy as writing an update to that service.

Since tinyCritic is in beta, we will be very interested in taking feedback from users about feature improvements, bugs, suggestions and design changes. We are committed to making sure that the site is as friendly and useful as possible to users and will take any suggestions seriously.

tinyCritic was made as a personal project, and is not at this time a commercial venture. We built this site because we believe that it fills a purpose that does not already exist, we think the site is fun to use, and we wanted to explore some ideas we have had for developing social sites on the web. We hope you enjoy the site as much as we do!

Just because this blog is supposed to log our development efforts doesn’t mean that I cannot post entertaining items I come across in my day.  Today I found a very awesome video on Youtube that was made by a SEO guy.

The author has decided that his techniques are worth rapping about.  He doesn’t give away too many trade secrets, but it was very entertaining.

A developer by the name of “CupBoy” has created possibly one of the most impressive Javascript demos so far this year.  He created a clone of Super Mario in 14 KB of Javascript code.  The demo is available here.

I love it.  I have been putting off creating a game myself, which I originally planned to write with a mix of Javascript and Actionscript 3, but this makes me want to drop Actionscript for some elements.  Javascript is not always the best solution for every application.  But there is a certain wow factor and bragging rights to creating something like this.

Very cool if you ask me.

This week Google launched a new product called AppEngine, which aims to provide a hosting solution for web developers completely free of charge.  I entered the private alpha testing and am still awaiting my applications approval.

In the meantime I have been perusing the documentation they have provided.  On the surface I think the program is a great option for developers out there that lack resources to get their product out the door.  Even though bandwidth and hardware is getting cheaper everyday, running a public website/application can be very expensive depending on the scalability of the features.  So this service is a great fit for that situation.

Right now they only seem to support the Python language, but if Google’s history of Open Source tells us anything then I think we can expect PHP/Java/Ruby to follow in the near future.  We are primarily LAMP developers here so having PHP support would be nice to see.  I would be very interested in checking it out for some of our coming applications.

FIRST POST!!!!  Welcome to the VillageMind developer blog!

This blog will serve as a forum for the members of the Village Mind network to share ideas, news and thoughts on the development of sites in Village Mind, or just to share interesting information.

Right now, there is only one live site in Village Mind, tinyCritic, which is a site for sharing short concise reviews of movies, tv, books, and other entertainment and products. We will be adding more sites to the network as we grow, so check back often for updates.