knowquestion :: Stephen Bounds

"Launch" is perhaps too strong of a word for something that is more of a personal hobby. Dropforge is a site containing the web-based tools I have developed for my own personal use over the past several years. Specifically, they are:

• munchcrunch – a RSS reader in the style of Google Reader
• Clamshell – an OpenID 1.1-compliant authentication provider
• Xandarella – a super-simple content management system for people wanting a way to set up websites for businesses or causes that non-technical people need to maintain

While the ecosystem of free and open source software tools has never been stronger, I've noticed a tendency for even small-scale tools to require the installation of a database server such as MySQL. This places an unnecessary administrative overhead for many situations where traffic and complexity is never expected to grow beyond a certain threshold.

The eventual goal of Dropforge is to unify these and other tools in a single administrative interface that will allow anyone who can upload a single PHP file to their server to access a wide range of software tools with minimum technical knowledge. But in the interim, even standalone these tools are useful; I use each of them every day and I hope that some of you may find them useful too.