This post is about sharing my project status. But first, a little backstory on why I’m bothering (scroll down a few paces to skip the boring parts and see the juicy image):

Sideclick’s origin story

For a while now, I’ve wanted to share what I’m working on with my friends and family. It seems like every time my dad calls, the answer to “what are you up to?” is always different, and I want a way to explain why and how without taxing his short-term memory with a long verbal explanation.

And for almost as long, I’ve been molding an idea for a solution to that problem in my head. The catalyst to get me really working on it was the announcement of the 2011 10k Apart contest back one month ago. The challenge of building a place to share what I’m working within the constraint of only using 10 kilobytes of fully portable code & images (no back-end code allowed) was one I couldn’t turn down.

A few basic criteria for this project-sharing project:

• Not project-type-specific (didn’t want this to only apply to programmers)
• Projects can have multiple members
• Highly visual and fun to use

I used these basic criteria to sketch out some layouts and concepts, and got to programming immediately. I will explain more about Sideclick once I actually release something.

Explorations in project status sharing

I ended up sidelining Sideclick for now because I couldn’t figure out how to do proper JS-only authentication without being allowed to write any back-end code, even with great back-end APIs like Cloudant, S3, and StackMob to handle data storage and authentication. CORS, I need you now.

So in the meantime, I’m going to share my first exploration into project status sharing, in image format. Let me know what you think.