All too often, I have ideas which might make a cool website or iPhone app or whatever and I know I just don't have the time to build them. I'm going to post them here in the hope that someone else might find a use for them. These ideas might already be in existence, of course. I'm not claiming they are unique in any way (although some might be).

You are free to take these ideas and do whatever you like with them. Of course, if they become amazingly successful, I could do with a bigger TV...

To continue from the post of a month ago about how Noodle was awesome and ahead of its time, I now have to point out Sidewiki. Darn it, Google. Couldn't you just have bought me out? I'd have sold. Quite cheap, too...

Anyway. Onto the next idea. Or ideas.

Keen-eyed regulars (those whose don't subscribe via RSS, anyway) will have noticed the new category for 'ideas'. I may as well put all these dumb little ideas I have out there and see if anyone wants to have a go at playing with any of them. Actually, those who subscribe via RSS may have been inundated earlier with a bunch of ideas as I uploaded the backdated ones. Sorry 'bout that.

Not two weeks after being pleased with myself that I could subtly rejig the design without only a few lines of CSS, I decided on Friday to completely redo this site.

Not only did I change the layout but I've made some major changes under the hood, too. I decided to have my first attempt at an HTML5 page. Granted, it might just fall apart at any moment in any given browser but...hey, it might not.

On the subject of HTML5, Mark Pilgrim (he of the 'Dive into...' series) brought up an interesting point in the WHATWG Blog last week on the topic of whether XHTML was actually a good idea in terms of enforcing XML syntax on an HTML document:

It provides no perceivable benefit to users. Draconianly handled content does not do more, does not download faster, and does not render faster than permissively handled content. Indeed, it is almost guaranteed to download slower, because it requires more bytes to express the same meaning -- in the form of end tags, self-closing tags, quoted attributes, and other markup which provides no end-user benefit but serves only to satisfy the artificial constraints of an intentionally restricted syntax.

And, I guess, it is a good point that a well-formed XHTML document will be larger than the equivalently well-formed HTML document. If, however, developers are given a strict set of rules and a strict validator and told "make your page according to these rules, this alarm will go off if you've done it wrong", they're less likely to fall into bad habits than if they are told "These are mostly rules but sometimes suggestions, this alarm will only go off if you got things very very wrong". Mark Pilgrim is, quite rightly, focusing on the user's point of view but it just seems to me that users will also benefit from more maintainable, better structured code.

Of course, none of this actually matters yet and won't for the next five years or so. It probably won't matter then, either. It is only the interwebs, after all.

A v. simple 'put together a twitter campaign' site (twampaign.com or whatever). You sign up, choose a subdomain (e.g. http://ihateie6.twampaign.com/ ) and give it a list of hashtags, phrases, words and accounts it should keep track of. You then upload a header image, a couple of paragraphs of description, choose a colour scheme and advertise it.

New twitter campaign (or pretty monitoring software) in 2 minutes. Shazam.

You start off by choosing a type of animal to herd. These could be real animals or could be similar to real animals but more quirky (and therefore fun). You can start with 15 hens or 8 sheep or 6 pigs, etc. You then are given a top-down (or possibly zelda-style top down-ish) view of your herder and your animals.and you've just to get them from one side of a map to the other. All fine so far, yes? This is the gist of the single-player version. With each trip across the map, you get a gold coin which you can use to buy more animals or customise the ones you have (spray-paint the sheep, buy a new smock for your herder, etc).

The main bit of the game comes when you go online. Each install of the game has a unique map which is your own home field. When you go online, you can either invite people to come to your field or you can wander off to other people's fields and interact with them. An interesting bit of it is that you can leave your herder and herd to wander off themselves. If you're on a desktop, your herder wanders off whenever the screensaver comes on and you can choose to passively watch as it interacts with other herders on other machines, if you've got a mobile device, you can choose to send your little guy off when you close the game and the central server will track interactions while you're offline. When you start up again, you can choose to see where your herd went. There's also the possibility of having a flash piece which will just let viewers on the website passively watch.

I think it would also help if there was some system in place so that people's fields could be next to each other, you'd wander off the side of your field and into your neighbour's. If the neighbour stopped playing for a while, the next new player would move in. That way, you could zoom out and see the entire game world.

It's not as simple idea as my last game design (blob-pushing-around touch-screen, flash crossover thing) but that one has been done now (by someone else). I did actually make this game (above) about seven years ago and it was surprisingly fun but I didn't have the marketing budget to promote it (i.e. none). There are some interesting algorithms you can implement in order to get good herd behaviour. It doesn't need to be strictly accurate so you can get some cartoon-ish wandering-off, notice herd is far away, running after them behaviour.

I've just updated trulyinnovative.com and www.trulyinnovative.co.uk.

I randomly thought it was about time for a bit of a refresh but writing it, I was amazed at just how much has changed in the 3 years between the first and the second. Despite the fact that they're both supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, they are quite accurate descriptions of two different aspects of the people who 'do web'. Must remember to update them again in 2012.