Skilmo - like FourSquare but for crafts and hobbies

Since last October I've been working on developing a crafts and skills website, and its quite presentable now. Its called SKILMO


Its like Foursquare or Indie Eyespy, but for crafts, skills and hobbies, so instead of getting points for checking off places you've been or people you've seen, you get point for learning to knit, or do origami, or playing guitar.

For me, the site has been a voyage of discovery in html, php, javascript and css, learning new tricks and figuring out how to do things. Adding more and more features as they become necessary.

But for you, the user, its just supposed to look nice and be easy to use. Feel free to have a click around

At weekends it has a lovely Morrison tartan background rendered in css, but during the week, it has a more sensible polka dot or checked pattern, except on Thurdays when its all floating flowers.

Signing up

Anyhoo, say you think yourself a crafty, arty kind of soul, then feel free to sign up. You'll need to click on the 'Register here' link on the home page, and it will take you to the great checklist of skills.

The list is a bit comprehensive and long so its got all the skills grouped into many categories. Graphic Arts for things like drawing, painting and printing; Textile Arts for knitting, crochet, cross-stitch and so forth; Photography for various genres, achievements and skills; Music for different musical instruments and performance related achievements.

You don't have to check off everything, you can add more strings to your bow later.

When you're content, click on one of the 'Calculate score' buttons. That will calculate how many points your skills are worth. The theory is that the more esoteric your skills are, the more points they're worth.

From the score page you'll be able to chose a username and password and sign up, so you can come back later and add more skills and crafts. You don't have to sign up, its not a biggie.

Members

Anyhoo, if you sign up with a username, you'll show up on the 'Members' page, and you'll have a profile page which lists all the skills you've checked off, and will let you upload jpeg images of the stuff you've done.

To check off more skills, like if you learn how to do double knitting, or manage to play a sold-out gig, or even figure out what chromolithography is, you can either go back to the checklist page, or you can go through the 'Categories' link to find the page for that specific skill, and then click on the 'I can do this skill' button.

There isn't much to stop you from just clicking on everything, and racking up all the points, except no one will believe you. You can prove you've done stuff, or just show off your first efforts at new crafts by uploading photos. At the moment the site only accepts jpegs and can only upload photos for skills that you've already checked off.

Photos

Once you've uploaded  images, there's this awesome whole side of the website where you can browse all the photos that anyone's uploaded and upvote or downvote the best and worst.

For each picture, you can see the top five highest rated images for that skill and the top five highest rated images uploaded by that user.

So you'll be able to spend literally minutes browsing through literally dozens of photos of skills and crafts.

You might be inspired to try something new, or make something better.

These crafts and skills aren't difficult, anyone/everyone can do them.

And beyond

So I mostly created the site off my own back, with a bit of guidance on css from Robbie, without whom the site would still look like this.

There's still loads of functionality I ought to add, but really I could do with more people using the site and playing around with it, and finding bugs and problems, and little bits that could be better, easier, and more intuitive.