Practicalmadness

You may not know this, but every year for as long as I can remember this site has held a little Oscars prediction context for which the prize has been bragging rights and often a gift certificate or physical object that I inevitably forget to mail.

I mention it because this year, my Oscars Game-related amnesia has expanded to cover the game itself. In other words, the Oscar nominations were announced this morning and I just realized like five minutes ago I’ve completely forgotten to write an Oscars Game web app for this year. Like, OMFG.

The Oscars Game is a funny sort of tradition around here: there are maybe six or seven diehards who come back to play every year, plus anywhere from a dozen to two or three dozen people who hear about the game from other places and check it out. But it’s one of those traditions that, like black eyed peas on New Year’s or Republicans winning Presidential elections, I’m not sure the observants would miss if it were gone.

For my part, the Oscars Game has served a couple of useful purposes. The 2005 Oscars Game was the first Rails app I ever wrote, the 2006 edition was the first site I did with serious Ajax, and last year’s was the first time I’d ever had to scale a Rails app so it wouldn’t crash every five minutes. Before that, the O.G. was my excuse to try out new PHP tricks and whatever layout ideas I hadn’t been able to use on a real project.

This year I’m kind of a Rails and Ajax wizard, and my recent projects have presented a lot of nice visual and usability challenges. I’m not feeling like I have any untapped ideas that make an Oscars Game really worth building, so we’re left with the community aspect. Though I will admit that if I didn’t find myself on January 22 with two projects on my desk, this year’s Oscars Game would have featured (and may still feature) some of the following techniques and technologies I’ve been interested in:

• jQuery, either in addition or instead of Prototype.

• The Facebook Platform, aka the gobbledegook that allows assholes like me to allow assholes like you to pelt each other with “Zombie invitations,” “compare me requests”, “movie quizzes” and “Scrabulous challenges.”

• OpenID logins, so you can use your LiveJournal/Vox/AIM/Yahoo accounts to sign in. Actually, now that there’s a great first-party Rails plugin for OpenID authentication, this is probably a must-have.

• A little design idea I’ve used on a couple recent projects I like to call “Comments Freaking Everywhere,” where users could add their own comments to any Movie, Nominee or Category in the system.

All that being said, I do have last year’s code which — with a little cleaning up and porting to Rails 2.0 — can be back up and running and ready for predictiosity in mere days.

So let’s gauge some interest. If you’d like to see the Oscars Game return in 2008, shoot me an e-mail at david@practicalmadness.com. And if you do, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could answer the following questions:

• Did you play the Oscars Game in 2007 or any previous year?

• If you played in 2007, would you want to re-use your username/password from last year? Put another way: would you be terribly offended if I made you sign up again?

• Also, if you played before, what did you think of the experience? Any complaints or (better still) massive amounts of praise? Any feature requests?

• Would you be interested in playing the Oscars Game as a Facebook app?