Lighthouse

I’ve decided to start work on a little side project of mine very own mostly to keep the old juices of creativity properly exercised and flowing freely, and to have a place where I can play with any new and exciting webby-type technologies along the way.

Lighthouse came to mind immediately for project management (New ideas pop up faster than I can implement them… must capture them! :-)) since I’d remembered hearing good things about them from the 37signals guys. To make a long story short, Lighthouse is awesome!

Getting started is easy - your first project is free so trying them out doesn’t cost you a penny. (I have other ideas I’ll eventually want to try out which is where the service starts costing money. Fine. I don’t mind paying for excellent software.) In terms of usability, the interface is a complete joy to use - the only thing that tripped me up (for all of about 2mins) was getting my milestones properly prioritized.

An excellent service I’d recommend to anybody starting out. Setting up Trac, Bugzilla, et. al, hosting it myself, and backing it up regularly is just something I don’t want to spend my time on.

(I went with a Beanstalk hosted SVN repository too which happens to have at least 1 very simple, very nice integration point with Lighthouse that I’m aware of anyways, but I’ll save that topic for later.)