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!

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.

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.