The project is seriously progressing.  I’m using the site all the time now to make lists. It’s great that the project results can help me as I develop.  My four ‘objects’ in the system as of this writing are:

1. Blog Posts (what will eventually become the content for this page)
2. Competing Services (more on that below)
3. Objects Project Tasks (workflow for this project)
4. To Do Items (general life maintainance)

The ‘competing services’ entry above represents (the current state of) my market research. I’ve identified at least eight different services that approximately deliver the product that I’m trying to develop.  They are QuickBase, eUnify, baseportal, Intranets.com, Caspio Bridge, DataWeb, Lightspoke and WorkSmart.net.  Once I get a fully-functional site together (along with, hopefully, some readership), I’ll make a more in-depth post about my ‘competition’ and how I hope to position my product in relation to theirs.  For now, though, I’m still at least 10 months away from beta.  Who knows what the internet will be like then.

In other news, I’ve bought the full version of Navicat to help me with my (now) 17 mySQL tables.  I recommend this product to any developer, particularly on the Mac platform.  Absolutely no complaints thus far, and that’s saying something because I’m using it all the time.

Hooray!  I’ve already got seven (countem) tables in the nacent Objects database.  Mainly they track pages and views.  At this rate, I should be done sometime tomorrow afternoon.  J/k.

In case all of you are wondering (all one of you… hi Mom), I’m programming in PHP and MySQL on my iMac’s personal Apache web server.  For software, there’s Navicat, TextWrangler and Photoshop.  In 29 days I’m going to have to buy Navicat, apparently, but I tell you it’s a LOT better than the other MySQL programs I tried for OS X (Cocoa MySQL and MySQL Administrator, I’m looking at you).

Not to meta-blog, but here’s a screenshot of the way things look right now: