The gods kill the kitten when ...

Hi, Habrahabr. Last night I finally brought to a usable state my little just-for-fun project - http://godkillskitten.com .

In short, this is a site where everyone can post small critical notes about the things that many people do day after day, not suspecting that they are actually not doing very well. After publishing a note, the author immediately receives a link that you can share with your “muse”, or simply place it in a prominent place somewhere on the Internet. Good notes after consideration by the moderator become available on the main page of the site, mediocre ones live for one month and are accessible by the link known to the author, only frankly bad ones are deleted.

Yes, even notes can be printed out and hung on the wall in accounting .

The project will be useful to a wide range of people - system administrators, employees of support and support services, programmers, motorists, teachers - in general, everyone who wants (and can) make the world a little better. :)

How it all started

Having once received the 100500th letter with the subject “ On: Re: On: Re: On: Re: An urgent report came !! ”And a text that had nothing to do with the report sent half a year ago, I decided that something needs to be done with this. A personal explanation to the addressee is not our method (such letters, unfortunately, come from many people), therefore this post * was written on my personal blog, and for some time I added links to it in the answers to some letters.

You know, it helped. I was pleasantly surprised - instead of letters with the subject “ Fwd: Bring to the attention of employees ” letters began to arrive “ Fwd: Changes in the collective agreement ”, and of all these “ Re: Re: Re: ..."Became noticeably less. In addition, an analysis of site traffic statistics showed that the post is very popular.

At first there was an idea to continue the cycle of publications on this topic in the blog, but it lost to another idea - to create a separate resource where everyone can express themselves in this way. Launched NetBeans.

How is this done

The task of creating a site with the functionality I need, on the one hand, is quite simple, since the volume of functionality is very modest, on the other hand it is too specific to fit into some standard solutions, like CMS (due to the lack of user registration, for example) . An ideal option would be to use some good framework, but once again evaluating the amount of work, I came to the conclusion that I can still solve this problem faster using my generic PHP micro-framework (MVC). I’m not sure now of the correctness of this choice, since the estimated time frame for the project t eventually turned into t × Pi, but what’s done is done. Moreover, the fun from writing your bikes is still much more than from studying the Zend manuals. :)

For this project, classes were created from scratch for working with bit.ly, creating sitemap, RSS - it is simple and very interesting, in the process I received a lot of pleasure. The most entertaining task, perhaps, is the implementation of ratings - I did not want to limit the possibility of voting for a note to one IP address, but at the same time I had to somehow protect myself from cheating. Yes, I understand that nobody cares, but this is a matter of principle. I will not describe the details of the solution for obvious reasons, but there are some reasons to believe that it will work.

Observing the consequences of defects in usability was a very useful experience - it was not clear to users that their texts would be displayed within a certain template, so 90% of publications needed to be edited. Adding a “sample” form to the fields has largely eliminated this problem.

What's next

The plans for the near future are to organize the broadcasting of new entries on Twitter and LiveJournal. If the project arouses interest and is popular, I’ll make it the Ukrainian version (most of the entries can be “synchronized” between Russian and Ukrainian sites by making a translation).

Still, of course, I would very much like to put in order the visual and textual design of the site - I am not a designer or a writer, because their quality makes me want to be better. But here, alas, I can’t cope without the help of specialized specialists - if someone is ready to participate, I would be very glad to cooperate.

Save the kitten - share worldly wisdom! :)

* The idea of ​​the question form is inspired by the once popular demotivator Every time you masturbate ... God kills a kitten

Upd .:I would love to bring to the main page of the project all the entries that appeared after the publication of this post, if you left more detailed explanations for them (the “Because ...” field). The options “because it’s bad”, “because it’s impossible” and “because only assholes do this” do not roll a bit, I would like for something more reasonable, smart, and, if possible, kind. :) I see that I have to think carefully about the rules and the user agreement.

Upd 2 .: Habraeffect. :( I decide with support about the upgrade of VPS resources. I had to remove the topic from the main one, I apologize.