WaterOnMars why and how ?

Why ?

With wateronmars I'm obviously not claiming to have done anything original, but the idea of this project started about 2 years ago when I realized that news readers were my main window over the Internet (and not facebook nor google+ mind you) and that my bookmarks, that I would expect to be a solid basis for any kind of search over the Internet, were uselessly being stored and forgotten in delicious.

At that time I was reading Dave Winer's blog posts about news and rivers and trying duckduckgo search engine in the hope that it would eventually offer better and more customized ways to search for information (I even proposed went as far as proposing that to duckduckgo team).

Eventually all this got me somewhat inspired and I decided that taking control of my "window to the web" was a very worthy motive to get my hands in the world of web apps developments.

How ?

This is a Python project based on django and which uses extensively Twitter Bootstrap, mousetrap.js and infinite scroll for its graphical components and UX, and south to ease future database migrations. Also the heroku platform was of a great help to experiment with the web apps as I was building it.

I must say that I'm pretty surprised of how much great (by their quality and ease of use) libraries and services are available to build web apps this days. It almost seems to be a more mature ecosystem than the one of the scientific and multimedia workhorse libraries I'm used too.

As a conclusion, let me just say that I would very happily welcome contributors to this project, so feel free to fork it on github !