Damnit sailor... with every post I read of you I get the feeling like somehow you're my twin brother removed at birth
Actually, I have been having this need for a while now too (EXACTLY the same... scary). My solution so far has been to keep a txt file on my server with an agenda for a couple of months in advance.
I realize that this is not really high-tech but you'd be surprised how much I found it filling my need. First and foremost it's highly flexible
Off course, I work at a company where we build web-applications, so my intention has always been to make a webapplication to handle this for me, however I wanted find out exactly what I wanted first, before I even wrote a line of code.
Now I've been at this a while (half a year or something? I don't keep old entries) and I've compounded a pretty detailed list of requirements for the system (I would send it to you, but it's in Dutch, so you wouldn't be able to read it). However I still have to translate all of it in a UML diagram.
Now I have also talked to people at work (
]Ibuildings, a company that, amongst others, builds web-applications) about it (a somewhat similar need exists at work) and to a couple of sales managers wether they couldn't find someone to sell it to and they did
. The customer (and people at Ibuildings) even want to build a small Java application that would act as a 'warner' for events and todos. So it's being built as an integral part of one of our open source products (
Achievo, a flexible web-based free project management tool for small to medium businesses) but, and this is the bad news, it probably won't find it's way into the main release until 2006. And even if I got the go ahead to share it with someone else, work on the project probably won't begin before August.
If you want to go ahead and build something quick I would recommend using one of the companies other open source products,
The ATK Application Framework an object oriented Web-application Framework, written in PHP.
It's what we will build it in and what Achievo is built on.
It's ideal for quickly making web applications. I actually believe that a colleague recently made a feature that allows you to just set up your database and have ATK figure out how to make a front end for datamanipulation of those fields.
However it's sadly lacking in a lot of documentation.
I could also try scheduling the translating into UML a bit earlier (although I'm pretty busy mostly, which is why I haven't built the webapp on my own) and maybe translate the requirements to english too, if you really wanna to ahead with this. And if you feel like using ATK, I would be more than happy to help with experience and general encouragements
.
I love my job.