Yes, I’m in (yay!) and I will be participating in Google Summer of Code this year with Joomla! For those of you who don’t know what Joomla! is, it is a Content Management System ( CMS ) used widely to create and manage websites. I will be working on an Enhanced front-end editor for Joomla! Ashwin will be mentoring me for the summer.

I am thankful to Sameer for inspiring me to take part in GSoC. I also thank Elin, Sam, Toni and all the other mentors and community of Joomla! for helping me better my application into something practical and at the same time useful. It has been a great experience interacting with the Joomla! community for the past 1 – 2 months and that is something that has really inspired me to work on the project.

Things have been moving very quickly since I got to know that I got selected on 21st April at 12:30 am. But, the journey has just begun. I will be coding this coming summer to complete my project and to validate my selection. At present, I have been getting myself familier with the Joomla! framework, finalizing the implementation details of my project as well as sorting out a few issues in my mind. I plan to give my best effort to the project so that it becomes a useful feature for all Joomla! users.

I see this as a terrific opportunity to work in collaboration with talented people from all over the world. I see now why people love open source so much. It feels great to be a part of the Joomla! as well as the opensource community and to contribute to a project that is used by so many users.

My heartiest congratulations to everyone who got selected for Summer of Code. You can have a look at the list of students who got selected for Joomla! here: http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/joomla

This post’s title makes my obsession with use of hash-tags in twitter updates pretty clear ;)

My college wanted us to do a project as part of a “Bridge Course” this semester. In a way, I liked the concept as it was at least trying to convince some people to do something besides curriculum. Personally, it’s always good when you are working towards some objective like completing a project you have to submit. An example is last summer, when I had to create a project for the summer and I ended up doing a lot of fun stuff.

So, I thought, why not build a solution for a problem I have been facing for quite some time now. Those of you who know me personally or follow me on twitter, know that I am particularly unhappy about my college’s attendance criteria. It’s always been a headache for me trying to keep track of when I went to college and when I didn’t. I tried using Google Calendar but I thought it was pretty cumbersome to use for this particular purpose.

So, I thought, why not create a simple, easy-to-use and nice-looking webapp for exactly this purpose. That’s when ProxyCal was born. Even at the beginning, I had the idea in my mind of a calendar which used colors like green, red and yellow to denote the status for the day i.e. whether you went to college, took a leave or college was off. One more thing I wanted to do was to avoid anyone from creating a new account for using ProxyCal. So, I decided that I was going to store all the data regarding the attendance in a separate calendar ‘ProxyCal’ in the user’s Google Calendars.

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I am a big fan of Twitter. Unfortunately, almost all of my real life friends are only on Orkut. Most of them haven’t even heard of Twitter. That’s how I came up with the idea of creating something like Twitkut.

I update on Twitter a lot. So, I thought how cool will it be if somehow all my Orkut friends can also receive frequent updates on my tweets as well as be able to read them from Orkut itself. That means they don’t have to be registered on Twitter to follow me and get updates.

Twitkut displays your recent tweets on your Orkut profile page. Besides, it also shows you which all of your friends are using Twitkut so that you can follow them. It shows you their combined recent tweets too. This way you don’t have to follow them separately on Twitter. You can simply read their tweets every time you visit Orkut.

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Yes, it is called Friendcomparé. To describe it simply, it basically lets you compare your musical tastes with your last.fm friends and neighbors.  You just enter your last.fm username and it brings up a list of your friends and neighbors with whom you can compare. Once you choose to compare, it shows you the top tracks, artists, albums, tags, friends as well as recently played tracks that are common between both the users.

Though it isn’t anything huge, I am happy with it. It took some effort, probably more in the design part than in the development part, to get it somewhat pleasing to the eyes and yes, functional. But it was a fun and learning experience. Along the way, Sameer gave me some brilliant ideas and criticism, for which I am grateful to him. Also, a couple of people at my favorite IRC channal, #think-digit, who gave me criticism and a third-person point of view, and also appreciation :)

As I went on coding and adding new little features, I learnt a lot on creating CSS layouts and programming with PHP. I learnt a lot more CSS tricks which are definitely going to help me out in my next webdesign project ;). And while coding with PHP, I eventually got hints about its object oriented nature and that how it could make expanding the application a very simple task. In future, I would probably like to make use of AJAX to make it a little more web 2.0 :)

I have this idea of probably building a facebook or orkut application for it, will it be useful? You can let me know in the comments.

Here are a few screenshots:

Links:
Build.last.fm: http://build.last.fm/item/433
Shegeeks.net review: http://shegeeks.net/compare-your-lastfm-music-with-friendcompare/
ProgrammableWeb: http://www.programmableweb.com/mashup/friendcompare/
Mashup Awards: http://mashupawards.com/friendcompare/