Saturday 31 December 2011

Don't just sit there, start doing something useful

Start being useful?



We were keen for the Sea Kayak Wales web site to move on from just being a placeholder on the Internet and to start being useful. We have quite a bit of work planned to bring the prototype into the hands of the sea kayaking community but we wanted to get something out there to mark the start of our launch year 2012.

Every web service needs some infrastructure and it made sense to build our initial offering in a way that also allowed us to explore some of the techniques and facilities that will be needed in the long term We will need facilities for people to “log in” to the site and we will need mechanisms for sea kayakers to provide feedback on the detail of our service. Thus, the idea of a news service was born.

We sort of recognise that the interval between Christmas and New Year (with near continuous gales around the UK coasts) is probably not the best time to launch a news page but then again a slow start will help ensure that everything is working in the way we expected – and gives an opportunity to collect ideas on how the facility might progress.
So do feel free to pop over to the news pages for a taste of what we can do.

Whats there?

The first challenge was the dreaded web site “log-in”. We wanted to make this as painless as possible while making some efforts to exclude the automated spam “bots” trolling the web.  OpenID was the obvious foundation for this. OpenID allows our potential community members to access the Sea Kayak Wales site using credentials from another web service they might already be using. Anyone with a gMail or Facebook account  (to pick just two) can log into our site without having to create yet another username and password combination. Sea Kayak Wales never gets to see the user’s account details – we just take advantage of the OpenID facilities offered by these service providers – all we get is a unique “token” to identify each user plus (we humbly request) an email address.

For anyone who wants to use our web site but who does not have an account with an existing OpenID provider (or perhaps folks that are not comfortable with the OpenID concept) we also offer the more traditional facility to create a Sea Kayak Wales account to use to log-in. We take a lot of care to protect SKW passwords and will be offering a fully encrypted sign up link (like the UK banks do) in 2012 so this is not a second class option should anyone need it.

Once Logged In

Now, once users are logged in, they can post Internet links (web sites, blog posts etc. ) as news items. They can also vote for news posts that strike them as particularly interesting. They can’t vote for their own posts and can only vote once for any given item but it is a way of showing interest in a given item.

Site members can also comment on news posts to share their thoughts on a given item or to provide additional information or feedback. Users who are logged in, can also reply to individual comments and vote for comments they feel make a contribution.

All of these new facilities have direct relevance to our future services and also provide (we trust) some great functionality in the mean time.

Wednesday 7 September 2011