Another quick hack project. »

Just a quick head's up that I have released another quick hack for people to play with:

whotoget.com

It's a little hard to explain (and if you check it out, you'll see that's one of the big issues I have yet to tackle around the site)...but basically the idea is a quick and easy way for a group of people to filter a CSV file.

The idea itself came to me as a specific request from some friends who needed something like this to (hopefully) save them some time in deciding as a group who they should or shouldn't invite to various events they host.

As explained to me, the process that they go through involves a flurry of emails and spreadsheets so that everyone has a chance to get the people they want onto the list for a given event...and then someone has to step in and complete the busy work of doing the final merge/purge of the results.

So what they were looking for was a simple system where they could upload a CSV file that all their employees could then, at their leisure, go through and mark which records should be moved to a 'yes' list and which can be put on a 'not for this event' list. Beyond that they had a handful of other basic ideas and rules around what they were looking for (for example, when you are saying 'yes' or 'no' to a give record within a dataset, you can just use the 'Y' or 'N' keys on the keyboard instead of having to click the yes or no buttons).

And so I really used their soft requirements as the basic road map for what to build in this initial version...of course I also threw in a few more things that I felt were required to make the system a bit more generic and scalable beyond just their specific needs (like the ability to work with variable length records in your CSV file, manage permissions on who has access to each of your datasets, and the ability to export the filtered results for each unique set of answers back out to a CSV file).

Overall, I'm pretty happy with this initial version and the basic feature set but the site itself could use a lot of help in terms of explanation (and general user interface stuff)...but I'll wait to see what feedback my friends who requested it and others have before I spend too much more time polishing any of it up!