Hunting Log, Food Plot Log, Property Log Website - Need help / idea's

[burmjohn]

I've been toying around with the idea of creating a website to help log and manage your property.  Why? Well, why not?  I thought it would be cool to have a place to log everything down so you can go back and check history.  For example, now that I have food plots, i figured it would be great log all the things we did on the food plot, why, what worked, what didn't, when I fertilized, etc etc.  Keeping notes in a book is one thing, but having it stored would be even better.

So the basic Idea is a user could "create" a property, then you could add different notes about the property and add logs for hunting, food plots, and trail cam photos,  etc. 

My first concern was privacy, some people would not want to share their hunting logs or notes with the world.  So my goal is from the ground is up is to bake privacy in from the start.  Where you can choose what things you want to share and don't want to share.  A major point of the site is to allow approved friends / family and or club members to view and contribute to your "property".  So In my case, I create a property on the site, then my brother and father could login and add their own hunting notes or food plot notes.  And depending on the privacy settings you set for your property, only my father, brother and I would be able to see those notes.

I'm in the planning and beginning stages, however I think it could be a great tool for a lot of folks. Regardless if its usefull or less to other folks, I'm going to build it at least for my own use

It will more then likely take me some time to get this project done, but I'd love to have the basic "Hunt Log" done before the hunting season so we can start tracking what we see, what we have killed, where, and how.

Also, everything will be "exportable" this way if you ever want to stop using the site,  you can export all of your logs to word or a text file to have for use elsewhere.  This way there is no feeling that your locked into using site forever.  I prefer the more open approach

I'll post some more stuff later on as I hammer out more of the details.

I'd love to get some feedback from folks and see if anyone would be interested in the alpha / beta testing once we get something to play with.  In addition for any recommendations / idea's from now and throughout the process.

Thanks

[TheHunter]

I think its a great idea! I'd be interested in helping test or whatever.  Collecting your own hunting logs must be awesome to read / talk about once you get a few hunts in there.  It should be fun.  How about adding a trip planner in there or season planner?

[Doc]

I love this idea. I might suggest that you base the journal on an Excel platform or at least something that could be saved of as an Excel document. Since Excel is probably already on a lot of PCs at home or work and lends itself to mathmatical manipulation for any analysis work that you might want to incorporate or that any user might want to add in.

Doc

[burmjohn]

Doc - The data is going to be in a database (not excel), however, I am sure we'll be able to make it export to excel.

The Hunter - Yes, actually the trip planner was one of the first things I was going to add (a basic one)

[WNYBuckHunter]

John, are you thinking of doing a SQL database? Domino? SharePoint?

I think its a great idea, there are some software based hunting logs out there already that you can look at for ideas. Ill try and dig up the one I used to use, it was basically an Access database.

[burmjohn]

The backend will be SQL yes, but thats transparent to the user.  That'd be cool.. The software I saw was horrible   I mean its good for idea's, but I love web based software. Why? Because its accessible almost everywhere and its platform independent by its nature. (I'm a mac / linux guy, only use windows when forced to)

[WNYBuckHunter]

Yep, web based is the way to go. The Access one I have is okay, just not the perfect thing.

Im a Microsoft certified guy, so if you need any help, feel free to ask. I can get access to lots of resources.

[burmjohn]

Nice, thanks. Hopefully I can get thing thing fired up and going.  I'm going to try to keep it simple, but nothing I do ever stays simple.

[WNYBuckHunter]

Yeah, I hear ya on that one!

[Doc]

I think the key is portability because users are going to want to know that at anytime they can dump the info off to their own hard drive in case they leave the forum, or want to perform extra analysis on their data. So your thoughts of being able to easily download the log into a format commonly resident on user's home computers is a good one and a vital one.

Doc

[burmjohn]

Yes, I am a big believer in that.  Any service I use on the web, I look for the ability to export, just in case a service shuts down, etc.  For example I host all my personal photo's on Flickr.com, there are tools to export everything off (and on).