Collectr - When life give you lemons...

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For any of you reading this who know me well, you will know that for what seems like an eternity I have been wanting to make a movie cataloging web application. This stems from a few

things:

1. A love of movies
2. A massive collection of DVD's from said love of movies
3. Being far to anal about how they are organised and protective of them when they are lent out
4. Being a developer / geeky type

All of the above factors eventually turned themselves into Collectr, yeh silly "web 2.0" name, but you try to think of a good name that encompasses all the collection of all media types that hasn't already been registered as a domain! Collectr was initially going to be a Drupal 6 site, as Drupal is what I know best it seemed logical to go down this route, and I have already got a theme thats 90% complete and I actually have a fully functioning module that uses Amazon as a data source, this however is where the path gets a little rocky...

The plan I had for Collectr was for it to be a service that was accessible from anywhere on a few different devices. Actually, before I go any further I should say that one of the other influences for Collectr was Delicious Library for the Mac. I love this app but there is one flaw, its based on my mac, I wanted to access my collection from anywhere which means having a mobile version, plus a web based version so I can access it from my work PC etc. Delicious Library does indeed offer a web export, but its read only.

So, back to the story... why if I have a fully functioning (if in need of a little tidying up) Amazon based collection app why am I not promoting it? Well, we can blame Amazon for that one. I had wondered why Delicious Library wasn't available as an iPhone app yet and a quick google search answered that question for me... Amazon have pretty strict controls when it comes to using their data in mobile applications - apps or web apps. Read up on the whole sordid saga at Macworld.com

So where does this leave me? Well the first thing I have to do really is change the data source as this is the root of the problem. I had a couple of months of fruitless research and then bingo, I found what I was looking for: www.freebase.com. I'm not sure why it took me so long to find, but now I have it has completely reshaped this project. As I said, initially this was to be a Drupal based project because I figured if I was going to build a movie / video game / music cataloging site I wanted to make it a useful data resource. Nodes would link together wherever possible, for example "Evil Dead -> Stars -> Bruce Campbell -> List of all Bruce Campbells movies. This would of course have relied on generating a sizeable user base who would search and add movies to their collections thus building up a database of movie data, a pretty big challenge but one that I think I could have overcome. Thing is, www.freebase.com already does this, plus it does it way better than I could have built, brilliant... but it leaves me with a piece of software that is ready to go but is not really needed, there is no point in re-inventing the wheel after all.

The way forward

As the title of this post suggests, I have come up with another plan to actually release Collectr, and make use of all of the awesome data that is available on www.freebase.com, and this time its cloud based.

So my new roadmap for Collectr is as follows:

1. Build an iPhone app that integrates with Freebase - looks like there is a really cool class library for this here
2. Rekindle my love affair with Flex builder and build a Desktop Air app
3. Integrate the pair of them with Amazon SimpleDB to sync the collections across the devices

Keep checking back for updates, now that the project has a purpose I should be making a start on it very soon...