Ask HN: Open sourcing my wiki-based social profile site?
I had spent some time last quarter working on https://secure.wikisapien.com/ (wiki profiles for everyone) on the premise that current sites are much more focused on recent and high-turnover posts, so the concept that it can be easier to find what someone had for lunch than who they really are. I hate having to curate my most recent posts to give a balanced perspective, so I wanted a place that could act as everyone's front page. Better still, it can be Wiki-style so you get a varied perspective on who someone is (with enough privacy settings to prevent problems). You also have incentive to mark who you trust, since trusted people can potentially see more and edit more on your page.
As I mentioned in a recent post "That's one of the reasons why I've stopped development on this: nowadays the only way to get a critical mass of users on a site like this seems to be by being annoying or shady, doing things such as scraping data to build up profiles, spamming friends, etc. I have been considering though opening up the whole project on github to serve as an example and see perhaps what others can make of it."
I'm planning to clean up the repository, get rid of all passwords, make sure local testing is working fine, clean up some of the code and documentation, and have something out on Monday or so. But first, would there actually be some interest in having this out there, or is it not the right approach? Is there something I should know about this process, or things that I should be sure to prepare before putting it out there?
Features: 1) Django, redis, SOLR (fallback to sql search), S3 (fallback to local files), MySQL (fallback to sqlite), FilePicker 2) Can immediately run on Local, Heroku, AWS 3) Designed to scale up nicely 4) Image uploading to S3 via filepicker 5) Carefully tweaked inline editing via CKEditor (with bindings for AlohaEdit too) 6) Trust system, and permission system 7) Obfuscated IDs 8) Versioning of changes
Thanks, Ralph