My next two projects…

Neither of the two projects I’ve been working on is ready for launch this morning, but I’m ready to go ahead and tell you what they are.

Last Thursday I made the walk to Calhoun’s and stayed there for several hours.  “It’s a shame more people don’t know about this place,” I thought.  “Once in the door, people will find lots of reasons to stay… but I know what will get them there in the first place.  $1.50 PBR all day, every day.”

So the following morning I took a break from work and took a short walk, and as I did an idea came to me – how about a search engine for bars that sell beer for $2 or less all day, every day?  Hence my post around noon Friday asking people to recommend them.  That seemed like something that would be very useful – college students and people who drink on a budget would love to have that information at their fingertips.  And since the Internet is worldwide, I thought, there’s no reason to restrict the listings to just Memphis.  (I did decide to restrict it to the US, since prices will be listed in US dollars.)

So, Saturday I decided to take an entire day off from going out, and I started to program it.  About 6 hours in, I realized something:  It wouldn’t be terribly harder to program a second search engine, a happy hour/drink special search engine.  One that would let you input, for example, “Memphis, TN” and “38103” and check a “Monday” box, and find out that Sauces has a happy hour from 2 to 7, the Saucer has Pint Nite, the Tap Room has $1 PBR, Rio Loco has $6.50 jumbo margaritas 4 to 10, etc.  So I started work on that one.

I’ve thought about doing these before.  The reason I never finished them is, I’d basically be creating an unpaid full-time job for myself, entering the listings and keeping them up to date.  Even locally to Downtown that hasn’t worked too well; my existing Downtown happy hour page needs to be updated badly.

But then I thought of one of my favorite websites… Wikipedia.  Wikipedia works so well because every page is world-editable.  Every person can add new pages and update existing ones.  Why not do the same for the search engines, I thought?  Yes, I’m sure some problems will arise with immature people editing drink special listings for bars they don’t like, and with immature bar owners editing the competition’s specials (I’m purposely not giving users a “delete” option for this reason).  But, if the bar or restaurant has fans, they’ll see the altered listing and edit it to put the incorrect info back on there.  Wikipedia isn’t perfect but overall, it works.  I think these search engines will have about the same accuracy in the long run.

So, that’s why I haven’t been around as much lately – for the first time in a long time, I missed a Pint Nite in order to work on the bar search engines.  As of this morning, they’re both about 90% done.  I’m not going to miss trivia tonight, but I’ll load the laptop in the backpack and use the Saucer’s Wi-Fi to continue work on them after trivia is over.  I’m committed to rolling them both out before the end of the week.

I know I have a lot of calls and e-mails to return.  If you’ve contacted me over the past few days, sorry for the delay getting back to you, and I will eventually.  These two ideas were just so good that I had to put everything else aside and get rolling with them.

The cool thing is, I’m programming it in PHP and MySQL, which is exactly the platform I’m now using at work.  So my side projects are improving my skills on the job, and vice versa.  Shout-out to Otto, who I’ve learned a lot from about PHP and MySQL since he and I became co-workers a few months ago.

I have several items on my “to blog” list, so check back.