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!

Update: MyVoteforPrez.com

One feature I'd like MyVoteforPrez.com to show off is a bio page for each 2008 Presidential candidate with a dynamic listing of current news articles about the candidate. I've been experimenting with the Google AJAX Search API to provide these recent news clippings. Yesterday I was able to get the AJAX Search API working the way I want it to. Basically when the bio page is loaded an Google News Search is executed for the candidate whose bio page is loaded. This is done by configuring a Google Search control to query Google News for the candidate and display a list of resulting news stories with links to the full article. Google makes it very easy to configure the AJAX search control by making the search sources and result displays configurable with simple JavaScript. In order to hide the search control I added a CSS rule and added a DOM element to show the Google branding "Powered by Google" image. Check out the finished AJAX Search control on Joe Biden's Bio Page.

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?

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!