Katie's going to Six Flags this weekend

Katie's going to Six Flags this weekend, leaving me with a Saturday all to my lonesome. I'm thinking about spending Saturday and Sunday coding. I know, I do that for a living now.

I've got two programs that I'm working on at the moment, though. The first, a blog assistant program, that will hold commonly used text that I use frequently. The text snippets will be held in a tree structure, and can be input and saved like a bookmark. So, instead of creating all my header, footer, image, and div tags, I can go in there and reuse HTML and CSS code that I use on the site frequently. I plan to put a little image browser in there too that can navigate an ftp directory and automatically generate the image code.

The second program, and the most interesting to me is a fantasy football mock draft program. I'm looking to design a fantasy football mock draft program in java that will allow up to 12 people to draft a fantasy football team live.

The program, as I envision it, would have to have three parts: the client app, the server app, and a host configuration program.

Each client will have a java applet that will allow them to choose their players, set a queue and browse the other teams drafted players and chat with each other. Just a regular ol' draft client. However, I'd like to remove the brunt of the work from the server (whatever server is hosting the draft) and allow the client applications to transmit data directly to each other somehow. The chat messages would be especially important since I don't have any servers that would be capable of handling the bandwidth (were I to allow anyone to use the program).

The server side code would only be responsible for tracking the users and a minimal amount of data. I might try to capture the end result, if I make the program freely available (if I can finish one in time for football season) and post a compilation of the results on my site. That's always good to know, who's getting drafted at what position by the public.

The last part of the program, the host configuration application would exist to allow the person who started their mock draft to configure all their options. This includes loading an XML file containing the player names (which means other sports could be included)... and selecting how many players of each position would be available. On second thought, it might take a little bit more work to design the XML parser to accept a position list and a player list.

This is an open invitation for suggestions for either program. If you've used blog assistants before, or mock draft applications, let me know what you liked/disliked. If you're interested in helping, or think you've got some info that would be helpful, let me know. I'm always open to suggestions.