Kaplogna.com Update

Following Team Fair Lawn's Kaplogna BBQ & Beer Pong Fest dramatic bracket championship victory I updated the functionality of Kaplogna.com. The bracket web pages now query a MySQL database table to display the winners of each match that already took place. In addition there are hyperlinks for each match which display a pop-up window with a game summary and pictures. I'm playing around with several Ajax frameworks like Real Simple History, to try and fix the well documented Ajax history/back button pain point for the Kaplogna web application.

I posted the Kaplgona April 21st bracket photos on Picasa. Enjoy!

Kaplogna.com: 1st Annual Kaplogna Family BBQ and Beer Pong Fest

My friends Brett and Anna are having a summer long Beer Pong tournament in the backyard of their apartment in New York City. They asked for my help making a website for the tournament. I figured this would be a great way to get more experience developing with AJAX so I've been busy plugging away at Kaplogna.com in my spare time. I set up a MySQL database to store all of the tournament data. I'm using PHP to query the database and return XML data to the sites' pages. Currently you can view all of the brackets using the drop down box on the Kaplogna.com home page. In the next few days I'd like to allow teams to enter the tournament by typing their names into a desired bracket slot. I'm not sure exactly how this will work but I'm hoping to use the onChange javascript event handler to trigger an AJAX function which will update the database table which maintains the bracket match ups. AJAX rules!

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!

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!