...but he had faith in this idea

...and he wanted to start a business around it.

That’s not why I coded the Rails version of MetaNotes for him, so I felt conflicted.

Despite my skepticism on this matter, Srini kept in contact with me for many months.

to be continued

It’s also quite hacky.

I’ll be the first to admit that the code I wrote for metanotes.lbox.org isn’t that great. However, I did manage to get my feet wet w/ Rails and Prototype, and I was satisfied w/ the education experience.

I emailed Srini to show him my work, and I even sent him the source code. (I’m sure this was like a cat bringing him a dead mouse—the source code probably meant nothing to him beyond it being a token of good will.)

Anyway, I was ready to move on, but Srini had other ideas.

Once upon a time….

Srini decided to use Excel to organize his thoughts into little blocks of colored text. He then saved that spreadsheet as HTML and published it on metanotes.com.

That was the original MetaNotes.

metanotes is the shit!

let me count the ways

I haven’t gotten to this part of the story, yet, but…

I wanted it to be known that the version of MetaNotes that you see before you is the 3rd incarnation.

This version is written using Camping and jQuery .

Its pretty kickass

wa wa wee wa

Srini- killer app my sticker friend have a great time at SXSW, I’m in full out self loathing that I am not there

An Angry Rant

In the original static html version of MetaNotes, there was a dark section where Srini ranted about other people stealing his ideas from him and profiting from them.

He didn’t want the idea of MetaNotes to be stolen from him, and yet, he knew that he didn’t have the programming know-how to develop MetaNotes himself.

However, if he put the idea out, maybe some Open Source coder would see it and turn his idea into a reality. If this were a Free system, he’d be cool with that.

and then people came on board the system

Yay! MetaNotes is looking great!

totally appreciate it.

The Unamerican Connection

I’ve been a fan of unamerican.com since I discovered it around 1999, and it was one of those sites that I’d check in on every once in a while.

One day, I noticed that Srini had a new “blog” set up, and I saw the original metanotes.com in all its Web 1.0 glory. I don’t know if the original Excel spreadsheet that started it all will ever see the light of day again, but it was certainly interesting reading.

When I read his plea…

...I felt that I could fulfill this wish for him.

• I’m very sympathetic to Free Software .
• I had wanted to learn more about JavaScript and AJAX at the time.
• I had also wanted to check out Rails, too.

Coincidentally, my friend, Jeremy Seitz invited me to go to the first RailsConf in Chicago. I figured that I ought to know more about Rails before I went, so the 2nd incarnation of MetaNotes written in Rails + Prototype was created so that I could learn about these topics.