LoveMyGarden.net is my main area of development, and is a social networking website for gardeners to journal about their gardens, upload pictures of their garden, design garden plans, and read some great articles about how to garden better. LoveMyGarden is a family team effort, with Fern Ness painting all the beautiful pictures you see on the site and did lots of design work, Melissa Ness did the majority of the site CSS design, April Schneider is the resident garden expert, and I did everything else.

I'm using Ruby on Rails as the framework for LoveMyGarden. I also use advanced Javascript and AJAX techniques for the Garden Planner, which is a web-based application to let gardeners design their garden on the screen before planting their seeds.

TelepathyTest.com is an experiment that was inspired by a story I saw on slashdot about some researchers at the University of Manchester who were designing a virtual environment to test telepathy in volunteers. Dr. Craig Murray is designing a system with a complicated 3D virtual-reality system, and though I thought that was neat, I realized that I could do it more simply and quickly with a web based system.

When you visit telepathytest.com, you can choose to be either a "Sender" or a "Receiver". The Sender is shown a series of cards, each of them with a symbol on them and is asked to concentrate on the card and to try to telepathically send the image to the "Receiver". The Receiver is shown all 5 possible cards and is asked to choose the one they think the Sender is sending to them. After the series of 10 cards are shown, both participants are shown their results, and the results are archived.

For telepathytest.com, I used Ruby on Rails as the framework for the website and used it to store the data that the telepathy test generated, but did all the heavy lifting with some cool custom Javascript built using the Prototype.js library. The Javascript used a polling mechanism with both the Sender's and Receiver's browsers making requests back to the server with the results and to tell the server that the Sender and Receiver were still there. I'm quite proud of this bit of Javascript and am working on some articles to show how I did it.