New Project: MyVoteforPrez.com

Earlier today I purchased the domain name MyVoteforPrez.com. I plan to use this site to allow visitors to cast their votes for the 2008 Presidential election. Similar to Digg.com the site will "rank" the candidates based on the tallied votes. I plan to show voting trends available in several different demographic views (geography, age, income etc...) using Google Maps. At the very least I'd like this site to be a good indication of who the computer/tech savvy audience favors.

JessesGadgets.com First Sale!

Yesterday was a huge day for JessesGadgets.com. Someone purchased my old XM satellite radio which is officially the first sale to a person who doesn't know me or Jesse! I'm not 100% sure but I would guess the buyer found the radio by searching Froogle. Thank you Google!

Rent Calculator Gadget is live!

I finished the web version of the my Rent Calculator program (see previous post for description). It's live on JessesGadgets.com. Click here to use it. I didn't build as much error handling and input validation as I would have originally liked but the application works and correctly handles all of the math to calculate adjusted rent payments. It was slightly complex to make this a generic application that can handle any number of roommates and bills. I programmed all of the logic using PHP and stored all user input using HTML forms and session variables. I'm excited to get my hands dirty in the Facebook developer APIs and build my "KissNet" application.

Rent Calculator Gadget (Web Application) Update

I've been a little busy the past few days so I haven't been able to make too much time outside of my real work responsibilities and errands for my "side" projects. I did make a little progress on the Rent Calculator Gadget I'm developing for JessesGadgets.com.
A little bit of history about the Rent Calculator...when my two roommates and I moved into our apartment in Hoboken a little over a year ago we split up the rent, parking spot and bills. My roommate Mike took the parking spot and the master bedroom so he has the highest base rent payment (static cost). He also took over the Utility bill (variable cost). I took the reins on the Cable/Internet/Phone bill (variable cost) and Jesse had only his base rent payment to worry about every month. The first month it took the three of us very intelligent human beings wayyyyyyy too much time to figure out how to deduct the variable costs from each of our base rent payments so we could even things out with our montly rent check. That day I sat down and programmed a simple MS Access Form with some Visual Basic logic to figure out each of our payments based on the amonts of the variable costs. We have trusted the rent calculator to calculate our monthly payments ever since.
I decided to make a web based version of the Rent Calculator for all to use and enjoy. It's not 100% done yet, I still have to work on calculating the final rent payment figures dynamically but you can check out the progress at the following link. As of now I developed everything using PHP and HTML forms to allow users to enter the # of roommates and bills and select which roommate is responsible for paying each bill.

New Idea for Facebook Product (Developer APIs)

I'm still working on a few tweaks for JessesGadgets.com including an online version of my "Rent Calculator" program which will figure out adjusted rent payments after bills are paid seperately. For example if you live with 2 other people and one person pays the cable bill, another pays the electricity bill...you'll be able to plug in those values and find out how much you each should pay in rent at the end of the month to balance out the other bill payments.
Another project I'll be starting soon (this week hopefully) is a new custom Facebook "gadget" which I will work into the JessesGadgets site. Facebook makes some developer APIs available and there is a library of some nice products that developers have created. There are even some PHP client libraries available which should make development fairly easy.

I saw a really cool Facebook application called MoochSpot which keeps track of debts and shared expenses among Facebook friends in a consolidated fashion. MoochSpot gave me the idea for an application I'm initally calling "KissNet." The idea is you can indicate which of your Facebook friends you have kissed. Then you can view who you have "kissed" indirectly through your kisses. It's kind of like six degrees of seperation but for kissing. I'm still working on the details of whether I should publish how users have indirectly kissed each other and how many levels of seperation to show and whether to use some kind of recursion to create the kissing links. Is creating an application like "KissNet" like playing with fire? Probably...let the games begin.

JessesGadgets.com update: More items posted...Froogle listing etc...

Now that the functionality of JessesGadgets.com is done my focus has shifted to listing gadgets on the site and on Froogle. Since JessesGadgets sold an item with Google Checkout it's now listed as a "Google Checkout Store" on Froogle which will give the site a little credibility. JessesGadgets is also indexed by Google so our search rankings are improving daily which is great!

I added a few more items into the gadget database this weekend. Hopefully I'll have a bunch more up there soon. Jesse started to write blogs on the JessesGadgets blog site. Things are progressing very nicely. Look out for some "homegrown" web gadgets, like my Rent Calculator program, which will be posted on the site in the coming weeks.

JessesGadgets.com update: Listings searchable in Froogle and Google Base

Last night I switched over from Google Checkout sandbox and went live with JessesGadgets.com. I also listed my items on Froogle and Google Base. Check out the JessesGadgets store listings:

Froogle

Google Base

JessesGadgets.com is live!

On January 17, 2007 JessesGadgets.com made history by going live. All of the test items have been removed and I put up the "Production" Google Checkout form. As of right now there's only one item for sale (my old portable MyFI XM radio.) I'm going to post a bunch of items this weekend. Once we make our first sale we'll be listed as a Google Checkout store in Froogle!

Google Checkout: $10 for signing up

Google is giving Google Checkout users $10 to spend by March 31, 2007. Sign up at the link below:
http://www.google.com/checkout/signupbonus_google.html.

Actually wait a few days until JessesGadgets.com is live and use the credit towards a"JessesGadget."

Jesse's Gadgets Ready for Production

I made a few touch-ups to the checkout process and the Blogger feed and now JessesGadgets.com is ready for production. I changed the customer experience slightly to a smoother checkout process. I'm basing my changes on the assumption that each user is only looking to purchase one item at a time. After an item is added to the shopping cart the user is redirected a page which lists the items in the shopping cart. The user can either checkout (using Google Checkout) or continue shopping. I was able to get this functionality working using forms that posts hidden values to a php page which updates the shopping cart. I also added some text next to the "View Cart" link on the main page which shows the # of items currently in the shopping cart. This week I'm going to delete all of my test data and load some "real" gadgets that we're going to sell. Once I do this I'll switch out of the Google Checkout Sandbox environment into production. At that point JessesGadget items should be searchable in Froogle (and Google Base once I add them.)

JessesGadgets.com: Google Checkout Customization Fun

Earlier this week I was having issues with Google Checkout. I couldn't get a dynamically created shopping cart to work with the PHP function which creates the HTML form which gets posted to Google Checkout because of the way the sample PHP functions are designed. The checkout function creates HTML to display a form with a Google Checkout image. This form includes a bunch of hidden values which are necessary to process a checkout request. To fix my problem I changed the PHP checkout code so basically everytime a user adds an item to a cart just the hidden form with hidden values is generated. This form is then posted to Google Checkout using JavaScript when a user clicks on the Google Checkout icon. Pretty clever no?

Integrating Blogger Data into JessesGadgets.com

Today was a major breakthrough for JessesGadgets.com. I sucessfully added a "Gadget Info" section with a list of recent blogs from the JessesGadgets blog. I knew I wanted to integrate a blog feed into the site so I could have a list of recent blog entries in a sidebar. I decided to use Blogger because Google has made some easy to use APIs available to request a blog feed. At first I experimented with Zend's PHP framework for Blogger APIs and found the process to be a little cumbersome. Instead I decided to use an AJAX reader to read the blog's JSON format feed with with the Blogger API.
I'm getting real close (1-2 weeks) from going live and letting people buy from JessesGadgets!

Update:Jesse's Gadgets.com Checkout is working

First of all I would like to say I love PHP/MySQL. It may not be great for enterprise level solutions but for most of the things I've done, it's been simpler with PHP. Database queries are done with much less code and hassle than ASP.NET. I've got Google Checkout working now for JessesGadgts.com My next step is to integrate the Jesse's Gadgets blog into the site as a sidebar and try to get Jesse's face and personality mixed into the site.

Update:Jesse's Gadgets.com

Jesse's Gadgets is coming along nicely. I got the search function working-both the full text search and the drop down list search are working. The programming was much simpler and much less time-consuming in PHP than it was in ASP.NET (as seen on The People's Ticket).
Next step is to add more gadgets to the database and include more information about the sites's namesake Jesse Lubin himself.

JessesGadgets.com (formerly JessesJunk.com)

Update-I purchased JessesGadgets.com since Jessesjunk.com was already taken. I'm planning on making a simple PHP/MySQL e-commerce site to sell my old gadgets using Google Checkout to accept payments and Jesse Lubin's likeness and amiable personality to market the site. Contact me if you have any old junk to sell. The first item to go on the market will be my Delphi MyFi portable XM radio. Check JessesGadgets.com soon for updates.

AJAX Fun

Happy new year. Hope you all had a nice holiday and were able to take some time off work. I took off all of Christmas week and don't have to go into work until Wednesday because the markets, and therefore my current client UBS Investment Bank, are closed to honor Gerald Ford on Tuesday. I'll be nice and rested after 11 days of no work!
I've wanted to get my hands dirty and learn AJAX for a while now but didn't really have a reason until last week. To make a long story short and faciliate my AJAX discussion...I volunteered to help the Hoboken Synagogue with their website a few months ago and met up with some of the other website volunteers last week. Myself and another volunteer suggested using a Google Calendar to maintain all of the synagogue's events. This way synagogue members could add the calendar feed to their Google Calendar (or other calendar applications) and the website could display the calendar's events. This seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to learn AJAX and another set of Google APIs. I found an AJAX calendar reader online which I customized for the Hoboken synagogue site. Right now the data isn't formatted very nicely but here's the link for the USH Calendar Feed Test Page.
I'm amazed at how simple Google has made it to query a Google Calendar. Using simple JavaScript functions it's pretty easy to dynamically create HTML and display event information. Maybe I'll even figure out a nice use for AJAX on The People's Ticket!