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Pacecar is an online reading tool, designed to help you read faster and with more focus. It masks the distracting elements on the page, giving you a reading window that follows your mouse.

If you’ve ever read a book on speed-reading, you know one of the main techniques is to use a pacer, something that helps guide your eyes down the page, and prevents you from wasting time re-reading. Pacecar is like that, but for the Web!

I built this for fun in my spare time, and I haven’t tested it on anything other than FF for Mac, so please let me know if you find bugs/problems.

TennisMetro.com

Unsurprisingly, it’s built on top of CommunityEngine, but with a lot of tennis-specific features added on. At the moment, it’s focused on tennis courts and players in the Twin Cities, Minnesota area (Minneapolis & St. Paul).

With TennisMetro, players can subscribe to their favorite local courts, and meet other people who play there. I’m an avid tennis player myself, and I was frustrated because I knew there were loads of good players at my local court, but I had no good way of connecting with them.

You’ll probably hear more from me on this next spring, when tennis season gears up again, but for now, check out the site and let me know if you have any feedback (esp. Twin Cities people).

Well, I wanted to learn how to write a Facebook application, so I though Teacherly’s wordsearch creator would be a fun one to port. Check out Wordsearchtastic! on Facebook; it runs on the same codebase as Teacherly (using CommunityEngine, of course, was a cinch).

Wordsearchtastic makes it fun and easy to create wordsearch puzzles on Facebook, share them with your friends and see who can finish them fastest. Enjoy!

http://github.com/bborn/communityengine-setup/tree/master

Along with the new CommunityEngineServer Amazon EC2 ami I’m making available (ami-cbc226a2), CommunityEngine-setup makes it super easy to get started using CE.

The CommunityEngineServer ami is a server image with all the CE requirements baked in (including rmagick, which always seems to be a pain to install). Then, you can use CE-Setup to get a fully functioning CE application installed on your server, complete with a git repository and working deploy scripts.

Enjoy! (And remember, this is an early release, so please let me know if you find bugs)

That is all. Move along.

The site is a group blog/community focused on baby products, accessories and DIY projects.

Using CommunityEngine is a huge short-cut, and makes the cost of launching a new site minimal. And since it’s a plugin, not a self-contained application like Insoshi or Lovdbyless, I don’t have to wory about keeping my customized social network synced with the main repository; my local changes are isolated from the core code, so getting the newest version of CE into my app is as easy as “git pull”.

This means all you non-English speakers around the world can use CommunityEngine to build awesome community sites in your own language!

This release is tagged v0.10.5 and you can find it here: http://github.com/bborn/communityengine/tree/v0.10.5.

If you’re interested in helping us translate the application into another language, please let us know! Drop us a line at Google Groups discussion list.

The new roles code is in as of v0.10.3.

In about 6 hours, I modified the default CommunityEngine theme, integrated the famous Teacherly Free Wordsearch Creator, and deployed the whole thing to one of my EC2 instances. Not bad for an afternoon’s work!

Here’s a screenshot:

So, why is this cool? Well, I’ve always said the hard part about starting a niche community site is … building the community! Finding an audience, developing content, interacting with users… that’s what success hinges upon. So why should programming get in your way? With CommunityEngine, you can get up an running FAST, so you can start focusing on building your community, instead of building the web site for your community.