Suttree.com: Casual Games, Social Software by Duncan Gough

It’s high time I mentioned this. The covers are off, the bugs are rampant, the first few users are nosing around, so I’d like to introduce you to something called ecolocal.

For a long, long time my wife and I have talked about setting up a ‘green’ website. Since our son Ryan was born, it became less of a nice-to-have and more of a when-shall-we-do-it as the paucity of relevant and helpful eco advice online became apparent.

So, what we have here is a Web 2.0 mashup of measured proportions. Using the comprehensive GeoNames database and the slick Ruby on Rails framework, we’ve got a location based forum that aggregates the news in a digg-like fashion, helping the best local news bubble thoughout the site.

We’ve split the site into three broad categories, Home life, Health and Family, and this should give you a good idea of where we’re heading with it. It’s pretty much a family oriented website that will ideally be a great places to find out about staying fit and healthy, making the most eco-friendly choices, building a sustainable lifestyle and having fun together as a family. A big part of this is our events calendar that uses ruby temporal expressions to handle some of the more complicated date patterns that festivals and markets like to follow.

All in all, it’s been a really quick process. The planning took the longest but once we knew what we wanted, buliding it was easy. Clearly, there are lots of different paths that ecolocal can take so we’re keeping our powder dry before diving in with any major code updates. In the meantime, if you know of any weird and wonderful household tips, let us know. If you have problems with your local recycling scheme, ask around for a comparison before you get angry with the council. If you know of a builder happy to use sustainable products, tell everyone else. And if you’ve got any good advice about building online communities, I’d love to hear from you.