bInspiration.com – a small and funny application

10 Replies

binspiration.com Hey guys,

I am really proud to present my last project written in CakePHP – bInspiration.com.

What is all about?
bInspiration.com is a web 2.0 service which aims at helping people to get inspired. Visitors are challenged to write a sentence including 2 already given words. The application is funny way to get creative, because “filling the gaps” in a text could give unpredictable and interesting results and that’s why I thought it’s really inspiring. More you can learn from about section of the site.

How long does it take to create this
Well, I’ve decided to create this application somewhere about mid of June and in fact the time for development and design was really short, about week and a half, but due to some hardware and admin problems with my hosting, I’ve delayed the start up.

Later on, I decided to show it to some friends and the responses were not very optimistic. Most of the people didn’t get the idea of the site, so definitely there was something wrong. Apart from this I received some very good ideas for improvements and I decided to add them before going live.

The features

  • Ajax interface – the whole interface is ajaxed and it’s really easy to use it.
  • Multilingual – thanks to CakePHP i18n class, the application automatically detect the browser language preferences and translate whole site. According to this, all user’s created content will be filtered by the selected language, so users can read and write in their preferred /or at least available in the site/ language.
  • No administration – yes that’s true, and it’s feature. As a real Web2.0 application, visitors of the site are the real administrators. They can vote for each sentence in the database and from their decision the content will be promoted or completely removed from the database /two spam votes will remove the sentence from the database/.
  • Follow an author – there is possibility to browse through all authors in a specific language. It’s also possible to follow them by subscribing to their rss feed.
  • View the archive – it’s possible to browse through all sentences in the specific language.
  • Changing the given words on the fly – this was an idea from Daniel – to give possibility to switch the current fixed pair, if the visitor is not inspired by the current one.

Future plans
Well, the plans really depends from the activity of the users. 🙂 But at least I have idea to make some statistical reports such as

  • Most active language
  • Most and worst sentence by language
  • Most active author
  • Most used words
  • Probably a contest 🙂

and many other.

I would love to hear any comments about it.

10 thoughts on “bInspiration.com – a small and funny application”

  1. Martin Bavio

    Wow mate, very cool app! I love that idea. However, I have three design issues to point:

    1. (critical) The voting for good, bad or spam is not clear. From an usability point of view, it would be wise to add some indicator right next to each link.

    2. (important) In homepage, where phrases are showing, I think you need to change the colour of the main words (for example “want” and “party”). They are too similar to the other words.

    3. I dont like how grey fits in your colour scheme. But as I said, it´s a very personal opinion. Have you tried with another colour?

    Ok, that´s all (for now!). One more question: can you comment in another post your process building the app with cake?

    Cheers

  2. Nik Chankov Post author

    Martin, thanks for the response 🙂

    What is your idea about the indicator for the voting? Do you mean some icons or…?

    About the main words so far they are notable /at least they are in different color than the user content/ Using blue, or another “strong” color I think it will be worst than current implementation.

    For the global layout – unfortunately I am not a designer at all and this is the best what I can squeeze from myself 🙂

    Any chance to get you involved in the translation of this project? Don’t tell me that you didn’t notice this 😀

    Thanks again from your response.

  3. Martin Bavio

    @Nik:

    1. Yeah, that is exactly what I was thinking, some nice and small icons, maybe “thumbs up” / “thumb down” icons?

    2. I was thinking about contrasting the “system” words with the “user” words, using opposite colours. I think that will look good, and it will read better.

    3. Your layout is really good! It´s just that grey, I dont like it.

    4. How did you notice that I can traslate your ap? Is my english THAT bad? haha… Sure, mate, I will try to do that in my free time.

  4. Nik Chankov Post author

    Thanks again for the suggestions. I really would try to use them, at least the contrast and the thumbs. For the grey color – I will leave for now.

    About the language – Hehe, your english is quite ok, I have some doubts about mine, but this is another thing, but look you TLD of your site 😉 So looking it I can assume that you live in Argentina, simple as that 🙂

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