State of the Project Address

Posted by: Matt Kull Tue, 30 Jan 2007 05:00:00 GMT

And now for this year’s blog post…

YourBarGuide is coming along. Charlie has been working on a redesign, which is really coming out awesome. So many nightlife sites really do not put much effort into their design, and end up super cheesey, unusable, and graphically overloaded. The only “night life” site I have found which really has a clean design is the latest incarnation of philly2night their designers did a great job.

We are focusing on a something that is light weight with usability as main emphasis with a minimization of gaudiness. Here is a sneak preview of a portion of the new header…

YBG Header Preview

Two items are present in that header are indicators of what is new. An Events management system is in place, as is user-submitted photos. These features are currently available for testing. An Evite style Guest List system is still being being worked on for events and once that is complete all of the major features needed for launch will have been implemented. (they may be a little rough around the edges, but the core is there)

In other news the yourbarguide.com site is no longer public. Previously created accounts will get you access, if you would like access use the form on the beta splash page. The site will remain closed until the new design is in place and testing is completed.

Code-wise things have been going well, I have really enjoyed working with Rails. There is no way I could be close to this far along with the site using any other framework I am familiar with. The test will come when it comes time to make it perform.

In the course of development to date I have created several plugins which I hope to at some point clean up enough to release. Acts_as_picturable, acts_as_mappable, and acts_as_searchable. I don’t foresee that happening in the near future however, as the current priority is to get the site finished.

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Summer

Posted by: Matt Kull Thu, 13 Jul 2006 04:07:00 GMT

Summer is halfway over, unbelievable.

Time has been flying by. Between the nice weather, shore house, and work being extemely busy I haven’t spent much time on here or on ybg. At work we are wrapping up footballfanatics.com, the big asp.net/c# ecommerce site mentioned before. It has been a lot of work, but I have learned a ton and theres some cool stuff done which I will blog about soon.

Lately I have been burnt out on ybg and other side projects, after a long day of coding at work its tough to come home and get back at it. I’m trying to get over that though.

I have made some progress on the Flickr integration, not going to make any promises when that will be up though. In other areas I have been messing with Pl/SQL and finally got my distance calculations going.

I ended up using the “Haversine” forumula and created simple Pl/SQL function that calculates the distance between two sets of longitude and latitude. Could probably be tidied up a bit but heres my first go at it that works.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION distance
(
    lat1 decimal,
    long1 decimal,
    lat2 decimal, 
    long2 decimal
) 
RETURNS decimal AS $$
DECLARE
    r decimal := 6371; -- earth’s radius (mean radius = 6,371km)
    rLat1 decimal := degreesToRadians(lat1);
    rLat2 decimal := degreesToRadians(lat2);
    rLong1 decimal := degreesToRadians(long1);
    rLong2 decimal := degreesToRadians(long2);
    dLat decimal := rLat2 - rLat1;
    dLong decimal := rLong2 - rLong1;
    a decimal; 
    distance decimal;
BEGIN
    -- "Haversine" Formula
    a := sin(dLat/2)^2 + cos(rLat1)*cos(rLat2)*sin(dLong / 2)^2;
    distance := r * 2 * atan(sqrt(a) / sqrt(1-a));

    -- Spherical Law of Cosines
    -- distance := acos(sin(rLat1)*sin(rLat2)+cos(rLat1)*cos(rLat2)*cos(rLong2 - rLong1)) * r;  
    RETURN distance * .62; -- convert to miles
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

That code uses a simple degree to radian conversion function

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION degreesToRadians
(
    degrees decimal
) 
RETURNS decimal AS $$
BEGIN
    RETURN degrees * (pi() / 180);
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

First use of this will be to show “Other bars in the neighborhood” when looking at a bar detail page.

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Ratings, Ratings, Ratings

Posted by: Matt Kull Fri, 14 Apr 2006 02:36:00 GMT

I’ve been trying to figure out how to handle “rating” different bars.

The end goal is have a very drilled down rating system whereby a user could see all of the top-rated sports bars; the top-rated beer bars; the cheapest bar with a good singles scene; etc.

My initial implementation was to have four fixed rating types using an AJAX “Star Rater”. (an ajax star rater is what sites like Netflix and Ajaxian use) I found a couple premade scripts, but ended up throwing them away and coming up with my own. You can see it in action on any location detail page

The problem is, different ratings only make sense for certain bars. IE Monk’s Is a belgian beer bar… it does really make sense to have a rating for “Dancing”. (in a different sense it actually does, the rating should be “n/a”)

My solution was to set it up such that bars have a many-to-many relationship with rating types. For instance now Finnigans Wake can have a “Dancing” rating and Monks can have a “Beer Bar” rating.

We’ll see how this pans out. Currently I have 22 different rating types. Putting all of these on one page would be way too cluttered. But I still need to figure out a way to present to the user why certain ratings only apply to certain bars.

Ok its 10:45, Thursday night, and I think I need to go do some “research” :D

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Launch Redux

Posted by: Matt Kull Wed, 12 Apr 2006 04:18:00 GMT

Its been 3 days since the http://www.yourbarguide.com has been up and thus far things are going great.

Frankly I’m pretty surprised I was able to get it up. I, like most developers suffer from “just one more thing”. Theres a never ending list of features to add and things to polish, the important part is to realize what counts now, and what can be visited again later.

I actually made a list, on paper of the features I wanted on the site. I then scrubbed every feature that I felt wasnt absolutely necessary to get the site launched, and stuck to it. (well not really, if i did completely the site would have been up by christmas….)

Even though its still in pretty rough shape the feedback I have gotten has been invaluable. As was expected, tons of bug fixes, tweaks, and feature ideas were generated. But more importantly it has been a huge motivator.

It’s been a lot fun too. I have launched plenty of sites before, but never one that was completely developed by me and of this nature. I feel like a little kid with his ant farm.

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Sickness...

Posted by: Matt Kull Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:52:00 GMT

So today is the first day I have felt near 100% in the past week.

Last Thursday I came down with Bronchitus. By Friday night I had a 103.7 fever that would not go away. My weekend was spent laying in my bed alternating between being covered in sweat, to being absolutely freezing cold and shaking.

The good doctor got me some strong medicines Monday though, and I have been improving since then. I got about 0 work done though over the course of this which sucks. Oh well, I guess I should just be thankful God provided us with Motrin and Tylenol Cold.

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freshmen 15 by kanye west video

Posted by: Matt Kull Mon, 13 Feb 2006 16:16:00 GMT

this is the greatest thing I have seen in a while, an absolute must-see.

chow down girl go head, chow down…

Freshmen 15 Video

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Heyo!

Posted by: Matt Kull Tue, 31 Jan 2006 04:35:00 GMT

I have been meaning to get a blog up and going again for a a while, Leevi Graham’s typo template gave me the motivation to finally get all setup and do it.

While it took a bit of effort, I was able to get this typo install up and running on TextDrive with lighttpd, along with several other rails apps.

I’m going to be moving yourbarguide.com back over to textdrive also within the next couple of days and try and get that project officially launched in the next couple of weeks.

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