Just reading The Design of Sites, my new web authoring book. The bulk of the book is a bunch of design patterns for web developers, some of which are pretty obvious, others are new to me (at least I’ve yet to apply them).

Patterns are interesting because they provide simple recipes to solve simple problems, but when you combine several patterns together you can solve much bigger problems. This made me think, is there any limit to this combinatorial approach? Would a site that simply collected and catalogued patterns in all domains be useful? You would carefully structure the pattern input process and provide features for linking to other patterns in the database (including some form of backlinking) and allow users to rate the quality of patterns as they apply them.

Given that nothing is as discrete as we would like to believe, I think that this might be quite a useful site and I may get off my ass and make it. I had a quick look around but all I found was a lot of software patterns and some architecture and web patterns. I started out looking for business patterns. E.g. “I’ve learnt a lot about the subtleties of my trade, but I’m finding it hard to teach my clients about the subtleties and manage my projects in such a way that means we don’t fall into these known traps.” I’m not the most amazingly skilled businessman ever and a set of simple small business patterns or freelance patterns could help me out a lot sometimes. It also seems likely to me that a repository that’s based around statements of problems would be knowledge in a form that’s easily applicable in a way that web browsers tend to like.