December 30, 2007
As I was walking to the grocery store two days ago I had an idea for a simple service that would allow for anyone with a simple internet-enabled cellphone to get deals and special offers at the store(s) you’re going to. Here is how it would work:
Deal Database (and website)
Create a database of deals. You can do this one of two ways, either create a community-driven site where people would submit special offers and savings from the stores in their area, or create a mash-up of all the current deal sites out there. Only problem is, there are not that many (If at all?) sites that display deals for brick-and-mortar stores, and most focus on online shopping. Each deal would be tagged with the store name, as well as GPS (Or Street address) location.
Using the service
The service would be very simple to use and have two ways you could use it.
- Simple search: With this method, I could be heading to my local Walmart and go to the services website and type in “Walmart Waterloo”, or “Walmart N2V1K7″ (Postal code search) or any other variety of searches to narrow down your location so you can see the deals for that specified store.
- Multiple deal search: Similar to the simple search, this one would allow you to search via city, postal code, street, etc and display all the deals from stores in the given area. This way, I could be heading to the mall and get all the deals from the 50+ stores within the mall.
- GPS/Location search: This one could work for GPS-enabled phones as well as any phone that can access Google Maps as it can now track your location as well. With this, I could simply log into the site and see all the deals within my area via a Google maps mash-up, or maybe a simple text feed depending on the power of my phone. Additionally, you could also simply search for “Walmart” and it will know your location via GPS and show deals for the Walmart near you.
With user settings, the user could simply setup what they would like to always use, but the initial setup would promote a more simple search, unless we can check and identify if the phone is GPS-enabled (Can you do that?)
That’s my idea in a nutshell, obviously there is a bit more to it but this is just a simple blurb on it. As for making money, programming it and publishing it, that’s another story.
If anyone is interested on working with me on something like this, let me know, otherwise tell me how silly my idea is.
I’ve been using PHP on-and-off (mostly on) for a good 5 years now and about a month ago I finally buckled down and decided to try out CakePHP, a PHP MVC framework that promotes “rapid development”
I will tell you right now, there was definitely no rapid development in the first few sessions of coding. I had my development plan, models were laid out and setup, associations were made, then I hit a stumbling block, putting it all together.
After a lot of reading, some playing around, and a few questions on the helpful CakePHP IRC channel, I finally “got” it and am now slowly becoming a CakePHP super star.
Today, I finally realized why they can claim rapid PHP development, as I created and finished a very secure, easy to adapt, and expandable user authentication system in about an hour.
Here is why you should be using CakePHP for pretty much any large project (unless your boss/client says you can’t!):
- CakePHP promotes an MVC setup, in which you are required to write good code. This makes you feel great and look like a rock star as you progress through your application and you’re not spending 10 minutes trying to find that user search function you created
- bake.php is a simple script that will take the models you have created and create views and controllers from them. If you’re having a hard time figuring things out, or you just don’t feel like creating all the basic CRUD pages and controls right now, this will do all the boring mundane work for you
- Built in session management and other classes keep the annoying nitty gritty details out of the way. Sure, it is always important to know and understand how core PHP things work, but if you know how they work, why not let Cake save you the time and do the small things for you?
- A growing code and tutorial repository make it easy to find and learn from various people. CakePHP had no Cookie class, so I created my own, but I was able to see how components are structured by browsing the Bakery.
- Once you get it, things move fast. It took me about 2 weeks of on-and-off sessions on the computer to fully understand how to build a large-scale CakePHP application but I finally got it. Once I got it, I was able to progress quickly and get things done. What would normally take me a few hours of coding, building of test forms and testing was minimized to about an hour with all the extra features of Cake
Of course, CakePHP isn’t for everything or everyone. If you do not understand the core aspects of the PHP language, I recommend you pick up a book, and learn PHP before dwelving into it. CakePHP kind of feels like I was learning a new language to a point, which felt kind of awkward, but since I understand the core concepts of the language itself, it wasn’t too hard to grasp what each function was actually doing.
I’m curious to how many large companies have actually used CakePHP for their own website or various tools, anyone know of any?
Some useful things I’ve found while learning Cake:
December 26, 2007
I woke up about 30 minutes ago, on this nice calm boxing day morning. Miranda’s sleeping all cuddled up in bed and I’m sipping down a coffee, reading some blogs, planning some ideas.
Christmas this year was much different in many aspects. First off, it was my first away from home, and secondly, I had a very loving girlfriend to share it with.
On Christmas eve, we had dinner at my parents house. Surprisingly, Miranda tasted all the odd foods we have for our traditional Polish dinner and she actually enjoyed most of them. Fuck Borsche soup, I will never have it.
We got home back to my apartment after hanging around for a few hours talking, playing, etc and we couldn’t resist to open our own presents. In my family, it was always presents on Christmas eve, but in hers it was always one present on eve, rest on Christmas morning but I guess she broke those rules.
She got me a cool assortment of apartment goodies to make my place look more awesome including this neat candle-mirror-wall thing. Got a K-NEX Rollercoaster set which is just freaking awesome, a very nice and soft bath robe, a ton of chocolate (that I can actually eat) and other small goodies, but most of all .. I got love, which is the most important thing 
For Christmas dinner, we had it at her step mother’s sisters house. Dear god, it was so cookie cutter. It was your typical 2.5 children house hold. It wasn’t so bad, but I felt like I was in a T.V show the entire time I was there, probably because my family is so different. To be fair though, Miranda had the same thoughts as me as soon as we got into the car she was laughing hysterically yelling “FINALLY someone understands me!”
Now it’s boxing day, and we have one final family dinner on her dad’s side. Their family is cool, very relaxed, more like the way I was raised, but still have manners, and those few special moments where everyone tries to be semi-serious.
After that, it’s a bunch of parties, lazy mornings, and hanging out until January 2nd when the holidays end.
December 19, 2007
I’ve always seen myself as a very business oriented person. When I was very young, I created my first website. The site grew large, and ended up turning out a profit at times. I never intended the site to gather a profit as I felt it simply wasn’t right so I tried to make sure I didn’t push much items that would garner revenue (For example: I only always had one single banner ad on the site)
Since then, I’ve gone through a lot, and there was some lulls in the world of self business. I joined WeSellit about three years ago and I’ve had a large amount of experience in the business world by joining this venture.
In the past several months, my mind has been on business almost at all times. I have a loving girlfriend, who I spend a lot of time with, who surprisingly is perfectly fine with me working on my own business ideas instead of spending time with her all the time. God, I love that women.
Anyways, I’ve come to the realization that there are so many services and products here in Waterloo, the city who’s motto is “Why not?” that simply do not exist. Why don’t they?
Look at San Fransisco: They have everything. Review websites for everything from dentists to food, entire sites devoted to the subway and bus systems, interactive features for almost all things across the town. As a tech-savvy user, I too want this! But it’s not available.
Waterloo is a pretty prominent town for tech-savvy and smart people (We have two universities and one college here), so why don’t we get these kind of cool things?
In an effort to kind of fit my needs, I’m working on several small to large projects that can fix this. I want to have the cool things San Fran has, and even if not everyone uses my new projects, at least I will have it for personal use.
I drive through Waterloo and I look at signs, stores, billboards all advertising the various things we have in this city. On my drive back today, I saw roughly five various ideas that could be formed and be very useful for the resources and locations we have in Waterloo.
Of course, it’s ideas that I have to keep to myself, or get a really good friend to do it. For now, I’m working on my own and hoping things get a float.
Finally, off topic but I’ve found out you can use Twitter with Google Talk, which is simply awesome. It’s so much easier to track Twitter now. Who wants to be my friend?
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