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.

Your vote counts

So I've been working hard on my awesome internet startup websitey thing, adding new functionality and cool stuff.

I've now got pages for each photo that's been uploaded for each skill and you can upvote and downvote photos just like on Reddit. And its' kind of neat too cos on the left side of each photo it shows the top votes photos from the same person and other top voted photos for that skill.

So say you uploaded a photo of some awesome piece of knitting you'd done, and some awesome photo of an awesome bit of chainsaw carving you'd done, and an awesome photo of you looking awesome playing bass guitar in some band you were in five years ago. Then when folk were looking at your knitting photo, on the right there'd be pictures of other people's knitting and on the left would be photos of your other awesomey things.

The main problem with this cool websitey thing, is that I'm the only person to have uploaded any photos of anything so its just me gurning and things I've knitted out of Sainsburys carrier bags over the last five years.

Still, the website is here, anyone can sign up and upload photos, please do, cos I'm not quite sure if it works right.

To register on the site, you'll need to go to this page, check off some of the crafts, hobbies and skills what you can do, then come up with some user name, then from your profile page you'll be able to upload photos and stuff.

Let me know if you have any problems, if for some reason you get logged out randomly, and if you have a retina display device, let me know what it all looks like.

Cheers

I am a female Goffin’s cockatoo

Thrilling progress is being made on my awesome internet start-up website thing.

This is the main page, this is my profile page and this is where you can register all the skills what you can do and open an account.

Elsewhere on the internet a parrot in captivity has started to manufacture its own tools. Its pretty awesome as we already knew that crows and jays could fashion tools out of bits of wire, but this is the first time its been seen in a parrot.

The bit that interests me most in the story is about Heidi, a female cockatoo in the same cage:-

Heidi, the bird in question, attempted to insert sticks into the enclosure, as she had seen Figaro do. She did not, however, adjust their sizes or attempt to manipulate them once they were on the same side of the wire mesh as the nut. Perhaps if she had been given more time to observe Figaro at work (he chased her off), she might have had a greater sense of how to use the sticks.

Me, I love watching people do things I can't do, and then having a go myself. Its just in my nature to want to try everything.

The past days and weeks have been fraught with the website. I've been learning how to do stuff in php, then once it works, I show it off to my nearest and dearest who just don't seem very impressed, and I don't understand why not.

For example, the checklist page was a huge list of all the skills on the database, I could image people slowly working through it checking off everything they could do, bias knitting, chainsaw carving, programming in FORTRAN, getting little stabs of joy when they learn about the existence of a new skill that they've never heard off before, like punch needle embroidery.

I couldn't understand why no one was registering on the site, why no one was working through the list of 300 or so skills?

Luckily, thanks to some good constructive feedback, I've changed the checklist page so all the skills are in categories, and you can just pick the one you're interested in. Rather than having to read through dozens of random ones that you're not interested in.

Its so obvious, but it didn't occur to me the first time round.

Me, I'm like Heidi, learning new skills. But I'm better than her, with a bit of practise I get better and get it right.

So, the next bit of the site that I'm working on is how it deals with images that have been uploaded by users. I'll let you know how I get on. Awesomeness all round!

Its alive!!

Crikey, I gotta say I'm surprised, but it was only a few hours ago that I'd figured out why my first forays into php had failed and now, now my skills website thing works.

Its all functional. It even has a background color!! I know!

Its still a work in progress, so don't get your hopes too high. At the moment it consists of two sections, the skill directory and the checkbox page.

The former is a crappy encyclopedia of skills, crafts and hobbies which are all linked together with tags, you can start navigating around from this page. If you click on Graphic arts, it'll take you to a brief description of the category and a list of the various types of Graphic arts, then if you click on one of those you'll get a more indepth description and a list of other associated tags.

The checkbox page is a list of all the skills in the database, you can check of the ones that you can do, then when you click the button at the bottom of the page, it logs all your selections with a random ID and counts them and presents this as your score.

There's still a long way to go, but it works, and I'm so proud, feel free to play around, its pretty robust.

Please don't tell other people about it yet.

Here's a list of features and pages I need to add:-

• statcounter code in the page footers
• sort out header and footer in all pages
• a home/index page with statistics (most popular, least popular, untried skills, average score, median score)
• an about page with me rambling
• descriptions for all the the skills
• statistics about your score
• better ordering of skills on checklist page so its more intuitive
• most popular skills on taginfo page
• my own photos for skills
• auto re-size photos
• discipline page which calculates which tag are subdisciplines
• scoring system based on popularity of skills
• your score for each discipline
• page to add new skills and tags
• page to delete skills from all tables
• page to delete photos
• page of database errors like skills without descriptions, tags without skills, etc.
• logos and stuff
• amazon affiliate links to instruction books for each skill
• links to tutorial websites for each skill
• recommendation engine.

Further adventures in php and GeekSkills or whatever

Something unseen grabbed my throat and dragged me to google, my fingers danced over the keyboard and searched for php tutorials. Before me, on my screen, the aborted php script for my websitey idea appeared and my eyes were drawn to a typo.

I had spelt html wrong.

No sooner was it corrected, and ftp'ed across to chrisgilmour.co.uk, and it worked, a few lines of my database appeared in my browser, summoned from MySQL by my php script.

And so it began once more, resurrecting my ambitions and dreams of winning the internet with an arty, crafty, etsy, songkicky website.

I came up with a new name for it too, instead of GeekSkills. I needed something that wasn't in any dictionary, a new word that sounds a little like arts or crafts or skills. I came up with 'SKILMO', like more skills, but also like half hearing someone call my name.

Anyhoo, here are three pages I've crafted for the site:-

List of Skills - this is a list of all the skills on the database, there are hundreds of them
Skill information - this is the description and associated tags for one of the skills
Skills with a specific tag - This is a list of all the skills that have a specified tag

I want it all to work first, all the php, sql and MySQL stuff working together before I try to make it beautiful.

My next task is to make it so when you click on a Skill on the first page, it brings up the Skill information page for that skill.

And then some kind of form page where you click checkboxes for all the skills you have and crafts you can do, then it gives you an arbitary score and secretly saves your skillset.