share news & announcements blog
 
Sunday, December 9, 2007
2:42 am UTC

The Basics: What is SunRayLab?

Posted by: Robert Samuel Clay / conesus | 10 comments

Hello folks. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Samuel Clay, and I am currently a student. SunRayLab is a free project collaboration social network. This is called SunRayLab because of the influence of a few bands, namely

  • Sun - The Essex Green
    (The album "Everything is Green" is Sun-themed. Big Sur & EiG is my original inspiration.)
  • Ray - The Velvet Underground
    (The inspiring song is called Sister Ray.)
  • Lab - Stereolab
    (For obvious reasons.)

SunRayLab is really just a very simple idea: Allow users to have documents, charts, timelines, maps, notebooks, blogs, photos, videos, forums, and file storage, and based on the relationships and context, there is a social graph that binds users and their content together. All document editing is collaborative, with complete revisioning and simultaneous input.

The point of SunRayLab is to allow students, professionals, and people from all over the world to collaborate on projects together. Projects can be small one-time efforts that are based on similar locations, or an on-going work that requires all of SunRayLabs features. I just want to make it easy for anybody to collaborate with others.

Everything on SunRayLab is free and I will do my best to keep it free. I also want low barriers for people, especially students, to start their own projects and collaboratively manage all of the project's data easily. This is the tough part.

I have been working on SunRayLab for a few months now and have about a year of development to go. Luckily, since I am a student, I can (and do) dedicate 18 hours a day on it. It's fun.

Please give me feedbackon design, on the business goals, or even on the market. Post a comment here or just e-mail me directly. I have some worthwhile experience behind me, so I definitely know what I am getting myself into. :-D

(P.S. This blog/news posting was composed entirely in the SunRayLab blog editor. It is a graphical text editor that shows you what will be posted as you are writing it. It does previewing, drafting, editing, and collaboration. It's really neat!)

CATEGORY: General, Unspecific category
10 commentsAdd a Comment
 
10 comments
Sun Dec 9, 2007
1 | Ed Ireson / ed420
I'm sure you're aware of the errors plaguing the site as of now? I'm assuming finals are coming up and time is rather limited ;)
Sun Dec 9, 2007
2 | Robert Samuel Clay / conesus
Heh, those errors are me working on the site. I'm trying out some new designs.
Mon Dec 10, 2007
3 | Ed Ireson / ed420
Ah, fair enough.

Found you via Seeed. Very interested in what you have going on here.

Mon Dec 10, 2007
4 | Robert Samuel Clay / conesus
Glad to hear that. Keep posting feedback, it's good for morale. :-)

Also, I should finish the profile photo feature tonight. Uploading is done, and the cropping feature is written, just not integrated. I also have to write a scaling feature for all uploaded photos. Maybe I'll start posting all of my activity on this blog.

I also think that you should somehow find out when a forum/blog/discussion that you have posted on has been replied to. This will show up somewhere on your 'me' page. That's coming next, after profile photos.
Wed Dec 12, 2007
5 | R. Samuel Clay / SamuelClay
So profile photos feature is now finished. Not only is the uploading super-duper easy, but selecting, editting, cropping your thumbnail, and choose a profile photo (from multiple profile photos that are stored in your account) is all finished.

Try it out at: http://www.sunraylab.com/me/profilephotos/.
Thu Dec 13, 2007
6 | jskopek
Found your site via Seeed
Haven't really been able to try the site because of afformentioned errors, but what I've seen so far is bloody impressive - how old are you again? :P

I'm a 20 year old student in Canada working on my own startup, and I think there may be grounds for some kind of a partnership between our two products. You're working on a project collaboration application, I'm working on a classroom collaboration app.

If you're interested, my email is jskopek@gmail.com
I love talking to people in my age group who are working on startups
Fri Dec 14, 2007
7 | Robert Samuel Clay / conesus
jskopeek -- I'll e-mail you at some point this weekend. I'm 22, by the way.

About those errors: That just means that I haven't been able to get to that particular feature. If you get legitimate errors on actual features, then let me know. Every feature that is built and is on the site should work 100% (as in, they are designed, developed, and tested). If the feature is absent, then the module that is showing a "missing file" error means that the feature will be there somebody.

Also, I should probably design a feature for making replies easier.
Sat Dec 15, 2007
8 | Benjamin Golub
Samuel Clay? Robert Klayman? Did you change your name?
Sat Dec 15, 2007
9 | Benjamin Golub
Might want to do some magic and say, if the user doesn't put http:// in front of the url, add it for them (click on my name in above comment)

Also, I'm sure you'll get to this later, but it looks off in IE7.  The javascript to move the underline around was dog slow on Firefox in Ubuntu also.  Great otherwise.
Sat Dec 15, 2007
This comment has been removed. It was spam.
Wed Dec 19, 2007
11 | Robert Samuel Clay / conesus
jskopeek - I'm e-mailing you right now.

I've been deathly sick with the flu for the past 5 days and am only now starting to recover. I began work on IE support, but it's somewhat complicated to get 100% right. I'll continue work for IE over the next two weeks.

I am also planning on finishing the forum feature, as well as beginning work on the photos feature. Next month I will be working on the project discovery and personal profiles.
 
add a comment
your name:
Your name is required.
your web site:
your e-mail:
Your e-mail will not be shown.
remember info:

your comment:
 
Activity Feeds Give the Full Skinny (Sat Dec 22, 2007)
blog info
blog description

Official SunRayLab Project Blog

Swinging

The purpose of the Official SunRayLab Project is to showcase features, offer insight into how to better use SunRayLab, and to serve as the official community of SunRayLab.

blog statistics
Since November 2007
7 posts
724 visitors
14 comments
7,449 visits