The auction for MyConfPlan has less than 12 hours to go. Currently the auction is now at $500 USD ($600 Australian dollars) and I’m sure it will go higher by the end.

Remember, you get:

• The domain, myconfplan.com
• The Ruby on Rails source code
• The Wordpress blog and theme
• Glory
• Opportunity to clean up the code and open source it, so you can collect new ideas and extensions from other Rails developers who want to add cool features

Question: What cool features should be added to MyConfPlan by the winner?

The winner will send all funds directly to the charity and instantly get a warm glowie feeling in their stomach. Send me an email of the receipt of payment, and then I’ll send you over a copy of the code, and away you go. Just like shopping at the supermarket, except its an auction and you have to win first. No points for second place!

Buy one of the coolest websites for sale, at the moment, on ebay.

MyConfPlan allows conference attendees to view conference sessions, pick which ones they are attending, see what everyone else is attending, and share what they are attending via personal URLs and cool widgets. Its written in Rails, currently uses Hobo, and a nice slab of Javascript for the cool bits.

And it could all be yours, with an auction on eBay. The auction starts at $1 with NO RESERVE.

But, I’d like to think it could raise $75.

Why? Because all the money paid by the winner is going to the Chad Fowler and Marcel Molina Jr fund for all-things Humanitarian, and so I can go to their Testing Training Day on the 17th of September in Berlin. Minimum donation is $75.

That’s right, the winner’s money could be entirely tax-deductible as its all going to charity. (You get the site’s code base and the myconfplan.com domain (cost of transfer is yours) are yours. I get entry to the workshop.

If it raises $500 then you are donating $500. If it raises $2,000,000 then you are donating $2×10^6.

The site needs an owner/occupier/developer. It needs support leading to upto RailsConf Europe, for example.

At some time in the future, it probably needs to be rewritten. I never wrote (m)any tests. It was built with Hobo, and I built it so fast I crossed the line of “playing with Hobo” and “developing and launching an app with Hobo” very quickly. If you don’t know Hobo, you’ll probably feel more confortable starting some parts from scratch, writing your tests, writing normal Rails controllers and views, etc.

Cool things you can do to MyConfPlan (please add more in the comments if can think of them):

• For the users:
  • Let users have “friends” - Show their friends’ on the main session page so they can see immediately which sessions their friends are going to
  • Allow Speakers to “own” their session, and allow them to update their session descriptions etc.
  • Allow uploading of slides, audio, etc after a session has been completed.
  • Give each session a forum before and after the session so people can discuss the session
• Internally:
  • Allow re-importing of conference sessions from their source. Conferences keep changing/adding sessions.
  • Import hCalendar HTML pages directly. O’Reilly conferences post their sessions in hCalendar microformat, so the data should be directly accessible without the ugly rake task I wrote
  • Caching - its got none where it counts

So, get bidding, and own yourself a very cool website.

The expansion of the Railsconf schedule has added a dozen new sessions, so I’ve added them to RailsConf2007 on MyConfPlan.

I personally am keen to see Jay Fields, the session on Apollo and Rails, and wacky tricks for rails support.

Only two weeks to go!!

Jesse Newland got the JSON API a day ago and already built a reusable Javascript widget to show conference session selections on his blog sidebar.

So I added it to my blog too!

Feel free to use his code, and write your own CSS to make it look sexy on your site.

Remember, its dynamic JSON (or XML) - so any changes you make to your conf plan will automatically show up next time the widget is displayed.

Doubly remember - use your JSON url not Jesse’s… its the link “json” at the top of each conference page, when you’re logged in. Alternately, just change jnewland to your username. Yeah, that’s simpler.

[Most of this text copied from original announcement]

Thanks Jesse!

MyConfPlan now includes all the sessions for next month’s JavaOne conference. It is huge! 400+ sessions, with up to 14 simultaneous sessions.

I’m going to JavaOne 2007

Remember to go see Charles Nutter’s JRuby session.