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.<\/p>\n
Last Thursday I made the walk to Calhoun’s and stayed there for several hours.\u00a0 “It’s a shame more people don’t know about this place,” I thought.\u00a0 “Once in the door, people will find lots of reasons to stay… but I know what will get them there in the first place.\u00a0 $1.50 PBR all day, every day.”<\/p>\n
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<\/strong>?\u00a0 Hence my post around noon Friday asking people to recommend them.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And since the Internet is worldwide, I thought, there’s no reason to restrict the listings to just Memphis.\u00a0 (I did decide to restrict it to the US, since prices will be listed in US dollars.)<\/p>\n So, Saturday I decided to take an entire day off from going out, and I started to program it.\u00a0 About 6 hours in, I realized something:\u00a0 It wouldn’t be terribly harder to program a second search engine, a happy hour\/drink special search engine<\/strong>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So I started work on that one.<\/p>\n I’ve thought about doing these before.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Even locally to Downtown that hasn’t worked too well; my existing Downtown happy hour page needs to be updated badly.<\/p>\n But then I thought of one of my favorite websites… Wikipedia.\u00a0 Wikipedia works so well because every page is world-editable.\u00a0 Every person can add new pages and update existing ones.\u00a0 Why not do the same for the search engines, I thought?\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Wikipedia isn’t perfect but overall, it works.\u00a0 I think these search engines will have about the same accuracy in the long run.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 As of this morning, they’re both about 90% done.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I’m committed to rolling them both out before the end of the week.<\/p>\n I know I have a lot of calls and e-mails to return.\u00a0 If you’ve contacted me over the past few days, sorry for the delay getting back to you, and I will eventually.\u00a0 These two ideas were just so good that I had to put everything else aside and get rolling with them.<\/p>\n The cool thing is, I’m programming it in PHP and MySQL, which is exactly the platform I’m now using at work.\u00a0 So my side projects are improving my skills on the job, and vice versa.\u00a0 Shout-out to Otto<\/a>, who I’ve learned a lot from about PHP and MySQL since he and I became co-workers a few months ago.<\/p>\n I have several items on my “to blog” list, so check back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 “It’s a shame more people don’t know about this place,” I thought.\u00a0 “Once in … Continue reading “My next two projects…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2492"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}