The Internet on Computers?

A few years ago, my company was contracted to build a restaurant portal similar to some other Toronto-area websites at the time, with the important addition that it would focus on searching, kind of like a Google for restaurants. A few years later ZEE4 built a second search engine for them, this time based on a system of tags. In late December 2007 I took a full-time position with them as the senior developer (aka, CAA: Chief Applications Architect).

In these articles, I’ll talk a bit about these past projects how it evolved and maybe give readers some ideas some ideas if they want to take on such a project themselves.

But lets start with the obvious (and not followed too many times early on): the solution to many problems starts with looking at how other people have approached a problem, before starting. This bit of advice might have saved a lot of problems early on, and saved.

An an example, and a teaser, if you want to build a search engine ten readthis article on the building a search with the symfony framework.

Until next time…

It looks like Sitepoint noted YYZtech’s list of best books for web designers 2007 a few weeks back - thanks guys! Seriously, SitePoint seems to be one of those publishers that is really improving, I remember their one of their early checklist books, good information, but very functional layout, flip forward to something like their CSS Anthology and you see how far they have come.

A critical hole in coverage of all things food has been patched with the launch of NachGrid.ca - Toronto’s guide to Nacho-serving bars and restaurants.

Basically this is our newest website that reviews places (mostly pubs), that serve particularly good nachos. Simple really - we can’t help but wonder wonder if there’s going to be an all-burger or all-poutine (ok, maybe more of a Montreal thing - though there are a few places on and off wheels that do it right - Mel’s anyone?) site coming from somewhere.

While finishing up some reviews for NachoGrid, in anticipation of putting it up today, a search for Artful Dodger yields this lisiting on alltorontopubs.com. In fairness, their’s is on pubs in general, ours is a bit more nitch, but at least it shows there’s life beyond the big three Toronto restaurant guides.

Hats off to the folks at AllTorontoPubs.com - they’ve done a nice job on their site. We’ll just have to make our nicer

Well since moving to DreamHost a few days back, there’s been no problems so far - in fact, I’m finding their organizing to be much better than the previous hosting solutions I’ve used. As of today, the under-maintained ZEE4 site is running on it as well… now about that under-maintained part…

Well this summer’s project, Halifax-Restaurants.com was a bit of a disappointment (stillborn would be a bit cruel), mostly due to my unfamiliarity with the CakePHP framework I used as the underlying framework, I was surprised to see that it was actually starting to attract visitors from the Halifax area, according to Google Analytics.

That’s the good news. The bad is the time I have to work on it. Ideally, I’d like to re-write nearly everything about it, then fix up the layout, which is too ad-heavy, as opposed to content for me right now. I have a few ideas about how that can be improved, but the fact is, adding content is the biggest task right now.

The last few weeks I’ve been selling off a bunch of older titles I had laying around (instead of working on this blog), one of them that almost went off to the local BMV was PHP 5 In Practise; Fortunately, I passed on that one and tonight, while trying to finish off a tag-generator for Halifax-Restaurants.com, it saved my tail at least once. When I originally reviewed it, I was impressed with the amount of material in it- it’s still one of the best books out there when you’re looking for something like- “how do I remove white-spaces from a string” and such basic but necessary things.

I’m sitting in a local Second Cup dashing (ok, bit faster than crawling) through my TTD (Things To Do) list, fueled by cold coffee (yes, more caffee - same price) and I’m thinking about the “Digital Bedouin” (so termed by a U.S. writer Dan Fost in his article WHERE NEO-NOMADS’ IDEAS PERCOLATE, written a few months back) and I’m wondering what it means- kind of like the team cybercrime or auto-crime (yes, apparently when cars where new, criminals who used cars where refered by their tool, much like there is crime and there is cybercrime - I give it another 10-15 years before it’s just called “crime” except for the old folks at CTV - yes, they still show temperatures in Fahrenheit, what 20 years on?).

Anyways, I’m thinking that it’s one of those things that people will just start doing without really thinking of it as anything special- go to a university campus and you’ll see students working on laptops far from the classroom - in a few years some of them will be working far from the boardroom- hopefully with newer laptops. Doubt most of them will describe themselves as Digital Bedouins as much as anyone called themselves a “computer user” past 1990.

In the mean-time, there’s a few good links over at Slashdot, ShannonClark, or Going Bedouin at Web Worker Dail if you’re looking to get into it anyways.