• Welcome aboard HomebuiltAirplanes.com, your destination for connecting with a thriving community of more than 10,000 active members, all passionate about home-built aviation. Dive into our comprehensive repository of knowledge, exchange technical insights, arrange get-togethers, and trade aircrafts/parts with like-minded enthusiasts. Unearth a wide-ranging collection of general and kit plane aviation subjects, enriched with engaging imagery, in-depth technical manuals, and rare archives.

    For a nominal fee of $99.99/year or $12.99/month, you can immerse yourself in this dynamic community and unparalleled treasure-trove of aviation knowledge.

    Embark on your journey now!

    Click Here to Become a Premium Member and Experience Homebuilt Airplanes to the Fullest!

Build/design log websites

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

etterre

Well-Known Member
Joined
Aug 30, 2006
Messages
313
Location
St. Louis, MO, USA
Hello to all.
I find myself in a bit of an odd postion: I need to find some sort of "real" project for a web app. I've been noodling about it for a while, and I think I'd like to create an app for a design and build log. I know that there's stuff out there and I've already taken a peek at expercraft.com, mykitlog.com, and myairplane.com I'm kinda curious about what people love (or hate) about these sort of sites. I also know that there's a lot of folks out there that create the pages themselves instead of using an existing templated site and I'd like to hear from them as well.

Here's some of the stuff I have in mind (nerd-stuff last):
  • Something that allows for design... most of the sites I've seen are oriented towards logging build progress and I'd like to log design progress as well.
  • A "new entry" form that allows you to type in some text, add photos and docs, and then add keywords. After submitting the form, a new log entry is added that looks pretty and shows up in the right categories according to the keywords.... My main goal with this form is that the average lazy user (yep, that's me) can go here and make a publicly viewable entry in less than 15 minutes so that I'll actually have a chance of keeping the thing up to date on a weekly basis.
  • Some level of security... I'd like to be able to upload a set of calculations so that I can share them with the engineer "looking over my shoulder" without sharing them with the entire world.
  • Automatic "landing page" so that I can have some sort of comfort level that every reader has read the disclaimer page at some point.
  • Some flexibility in view-types for the reader - ability to read entries from day one in chronological order, "skip the mistakes": read only the entries about parts that made it into the flying airplane, show a tree-view based on the parts of the airplane (Airplane has fuselage, tail, wings, engine, and avionics as children. Each of those has children as well: tail has horizontal and vertical as children, vertical has rudder and rudder trim as children, etc.) so you can choose to read about the entries related to the rudder
  • Database back-end that stores the text and the layout
  • Some pages with SilverLight, just to be cool
  • Any forms will have an AJAX-enabled version
  • Any page that can't be sent to the reader's browser as "pure" HTML will have some sort of HTML "sorry, scripts not enabled page," or (as in the case of the AJAX stuff) a page that offers the core functionality without the shiny stuff.
Thoughts?
 
Back
Top