I can't thank Kcat and Dillo enough for orchestrating the whole ink exchange idea and vial procurement system.

Scrolling through page upon page of comments on Kcat's ink exchange thread (about 1/3 of which are from people not actively trading) to find one's perfect match of having ink you want and wanting ink you have is a bit tedious. But, wait, we are doing this via computer, a machine designed for crunching data -- let's make it do the work!

If I were to throw together a little web page where folks could input their ink haves and wants and search for others with compatible ones, would anyone here be interested in using it?

Hi,

That would sound like a good idea+we could edit what we have.

Only concern is to get it to work with the FPN system. That would make it work a lot nicer since we wouldn't have to reregister.

Dillon

I'd have to look into the FPN software to see what cross-authentication would require, which doesn't seem to be in keeping with the IP.Board license as I very casually skimmed it just now.

It would be easy to pop OpenID authentication into the ink exchange site. All MySpace, Yahoo, LiveJournal, AOL, WordPress, Flickr, Blogger, and Technorati users, just to name a few, already have OpenIDs, so very few people would have to create accounts the old-fashioned way. I could set up a quick test site to see how it goes, then, assuming it catches on, when it's no longer beta-ish I could keep it or move it over to fpn, whichever the fpn gods prefer.

Susan

That would rock.

This site is PHP, so if it could be done in PHP, it might be able to hook in together.

Wouldn't have to write the app in PHP, if it's running on the same server, it can get the auth info from the same database, or run it through PHP. Whether screen scraping or API usage you could use it from any other language.

Aaron

My concern isn't with the technical possibility of cross-authentication, but with licensing issues -- to the best of my knowledge, IP.Board isn't available under the GPL or similar, and I'm not sure exactly what restrictions their license imposes.

At least a few people seem interested... I will start tinkering with this idea in the not-too-distant future, free time permitting.

--HedgeMage

Anything! I'm new here and new to FPs and Ink. One thing I do know, though, one bottle of FPN Van Gogh Starry Blue Nights is probably enough to last me a lifetime. And! I want to try other colors. So say I buy 10 bottles of different color ink. Enough for 10 lifetimes at an investment of over $90, and what do I have? Only 10 different colors of ink.

If I could trade with only one other person, who had 10 different inks than I do, for just a little postage, I now have 20 colors, I doubled my fun.


-Gawain

A searchable data base would be an excellent idea and a great addition to the FPN site/listings. I would like to get into the program, but frankly, I found that wading through all the offers and extraneous comments just too daunting. This sort of thing would help a lot.

Great idea!

This would definitely be a great idea... When would you be able to get a prototype ready?

'

Awesome idea! It would be good to know who's still actively trading and it would be nice to be able to update when one acquires new ink!

Oops -- this post was cut off when my connection died. I've re-posted the full text below.

Mods, feel free to delete this if you would like.

--HedgeMage

Okay, so here are my notes on the ink exchange -- comments appreciated:

FPN Cross-Authentication -- I've just emailed the FPN admins in the hopes that someone with backend knowledge can give me guidance on creating a scheme for cross-authentication with FPN. It's probably workable, I'm just not sure how involved a project it would be, or how it would be effected by the license IP.Board is released under. In short, cross-authentication is on my wish list, too, but it definitely won't make it into my first alpha/proof-of-concept version.

OpenID Authentication -- It seems that most users here have OpenIDs, judging from the heavy use of blogging and other services that provide them. OpenID authentication is already available for the platform I plan to use.

User Profiles -- Everyone will have a configurable user profile, including the chance to specify all the inks they have and want, and whether or not they are actively trading. Users could easily edit their profiles at any time.

User Search -- Planned for the Alpha/PoC is the ability to search for users be inks wanted, inks offered, country, or some combination of the above.

Contacting Users -- Users will be able to enter their Jabber, AIM, Yahoo, and FPN IDs for people to contact them. Email addresses won't be public, but users will have the option to turn on a contact form that will email them without publishing the address.

Theming -- I'm not planning anything spectacular, at least at first. I'll provide several canned (pre-made) themes that users can choose from to make the site more pleasing to look at. Perhaps down the road, some FPN/Ink Exchange user will create some lovely FP and/or ink related graphics and I'll work on a custom theme.

Extras -- Eventually, I'd like to create the ability to just click a link and see a list of everyone who wants an ink you have and has an ink you want, and/or to get an RSS feed or email updates on such users. Also interesting would be a feature in which users rate how much they like different inks, and the site will recommend inks they might enjoy based on the likes/dislikes of users with similar rating patterns. It may be useful to expire ink exchange profiles after a certain amount of inactivity, to make sure seekers don't waste time querying long-gone traders. A usable workflow might be: a user is considered inactive after not logging in for time period X, the site automatically sends a reminder email at X-1week and X-1day, if X rolls around with no log-in, the user is marked as inactive (the same way that users who voluntarily mark themselves inactive are). If/when the user ever logs in again, he/she may set him/her-self active if desired.

Timeline -- I hope to tinker with this a bit next weekend, at least enough to put up an alpha/PoC. However, that depends on how work goes this week. Keep your fingers crossed!

Notes for my fellow techies:

I'll stick the alpha/PoC on a subdomain of my personal site -- this may or may not end up being its permanent home.

I'm planning to develop this on Drupal for a couple of reasons: I develop on Drupal for a living, so I can put something together rapidly and well. Drupal natively supports most of the features we need, and almost all of them with a few carefully chosen contrib. modules. I already maintain a bunch of Drupal sites for work, so the overhead of maintaining the ink exchange will be much lower than the maintaining it on a different software platform (or worse -- maintaining something I've written from scratch). I don't want to have to abandon the ink exchange once it's running, so keeping the time commitment manageable is essential. Last but certainly not least: Drupal is a great platform. Thanks to its security, flexibility, and amazing community, it's in use at NASA, Warner Bros., Sony, NATO, Google, Yahoo, and many other "big guns" that have the pick of the litter when it comes to software.