Surf Roots, Software Thoughts

I’ve had an idea for a long time to create an anonymous forum for people to post little ways that they’ve helped out. This idea was mostly inspired by those insurance commercials where someone will do something nice or courteous and another person will observe the act. Then the observer will also do something nice or courteous, and the chain contains.

After thinking a lot last night about jobs and helping out, I decided to make my idea a reality. I contacted a friend of mine who I met at the Google APM batch day, Eric Fisher, to see if he was interested in whipping up a quick layout. I’m absolutely awful at making pretty layouts, so I try to delegate as much as possible. Anyway, I sent Eric an email with a quick description of what the plans are. He sent a reply about 90 minutes later with a link. Eric is a magician. He managed the code a beautiful, functional, AJAX-enabled site in 90 minutes. How did this guy not get hired by Google? Thanks, Eric!

Eric zipped up the source and sent it my way along with a SQL dump. I spent about an hour changing a few things, adding a captcha, and getting it setup on my web server.

I present to you helpd.org, a place where you can make anonymous posts about ways you’ve helped out. Helpd is pretty basic at this point, and my plan is to greatly expand it if people find it interesting. I have a few thoughts in mind: RSS feed, pagination, browsing capabilities, voting systems, categories, community aspects, etc.

Go take a look at the site, make a post, and tell your friends. I think it’d be really cool if this site took off, and my plan is to give all the proceeds to Wikipedia and Craigslist.