Railing on Mixotronic

As part of my continuing self-education in web programming, I’ve decided to take a crack at revamping the venerable Mix-O-Tronic (which is still in quiet existence, by the way) into a Ruby on Rails application.

While I was sketching out the idea in my notebook, I suddenly got a flash of inspiration to use it as a sort of jump-off point for a social site.  Terms are still put together to elicit concepts from people – but users would have the option (if not obligation) to comment on any of the terms (I’m thinking of renaming them ‘phrases’), or the concept as a whole.  When terms come up for other users, they can see the trail of comments that people have left, some other concepts that have been created with them, and so on.  And if a concept comes up for another person, the same applies.

Terms could be added by users (subject to approval, of course) – which would cut down on the workload for keeping it up-to-date and back-cataloging the whole thing, which is still a problem.

I think it would be a very niche (but fun) social site, and pretty straight-forward to code in Rails.  A sort of high-concept pitch machine rolled in the madness of crowds.

In other Mix-O-Tronic news, I have the following books out from the library:

1001 Books to Read Before You Die

1001 Movies to Read Before You Die, and

The Encyclopedia of American Television (1945-2003).

Reading the entry on Benson alone is worth lugging around the last title.