If you liked that, you might be interested in Designing for Social Traction.

Here at the office Tom occasionally has to write Regular Expressions. He’s come to depend on a tool called RegexBuddy (for Windows) which he purchased for only $40. A really great value when you consider the time he’s saved.

Me? I don’t use regular expressions, I use Extra-Large Expressions.

• Bruce Tate. He’s a hard-core Java guy who is now using Ruby and Rails. His blog is great, and he has published many books. His most recent on is “From Java To Ruby”
• David Heinemeier Hansson – Ruby on Rails resources.
• Code Generation: The Real Lesson of Rails
• PHP vs Ruby – Nola Stowe – has a number of articles comparing various technical aspects of Ruby and PHP.
• Data Types – PHP Vs Ruby (Part 2) on Code Snipers
• PHP vs Ruby on Rails (Parts 1 & 2)

For the user picture, we’ve decided to go with the typical square image, since that’s what everybody is familiar with. We’re thinking about trying something unique, and that is to also allow you to upload an image of your logo. It’s unique because only you will be able to see it.

As you can see, we allow people to upload two images. The image of the cowboy just might be our default user profile picture. We’re still trying to decide. What should we name him?

That’s an example of how it will look once you integrate both images into the header. It’s a nice and clean look, and is one of the ways people can personalize the web app.

I’m not quite sure yet whether Amazon S3 can store a database, and what it would really cost considering all of the constant data transfer, but if Amazon S3 can handle what we want to do, and for less cost, we may consider using it for Roundup. It would enable us to scale easier and without the added cost of additional servers and infastructure.

Originally when we set out to build Roundup, it was just a tool for tracking your time.

Over time we realized a lot of people create lists of things they need to do, and then track time against those lists.

So we added a task area.

Of course, we couldn’t stop there. We knew we had tasks and tasks are always associated with a project. So we had to create methods for managing projects and clients.

Before we knew it, we weren’t sure if we were building a time tracking application, or a product that helps you manage your projects.

This presents a number of questions. Where does our product fit in the market place? Does it compete with time tracking applications or project management applications?

Do we market it as a time tracking application (its strength) or as a project management tool?

And does it step up to the plate in every area? Or is it strong in one and weak in another?

These are the challanges we are facing at the moment. I will of course continue to post here about our progress.