Features List and Friends - Added

Just a quick update - have spent the last weekish solidly working on implementing the Friends and Features List suggestions.

Each user now has their own friends list which can be viewed at http://mynewfavourite.biz/users/ your user number /friends - mine for example is http://mynewfavourite.biz/users/1/friends. From here you are able to see which users have added you as a friend and also remove friends from your list.

If you goto http://mynewfavourite.biz/features you are able to see all the feaures implemented and rate upcoming features.

Access Denied

Yesterday I lost the ability to run migrations (create / edit / delete tables within a database) - I had it and then I lost it. This was the error: Access denied for user 'mnfb'@'apache2-yak.wrangler.dreamhost.com' (using password: YES)... Great...

So I wrote Dreamhost about it and within 24 hours I had a response to my problems (that's impressive) - somewhere along the lines there had been a database user / pass mismatch, fixed it up and it is back to working perfectly :).

Finally... Application Deployed On Dreamhost

Finally, after 15 hours of trial and error, 7 tutorials and many many cuss words - http://mynewfavourite.biz is live!

Come along and signup now for a free account!

Premlim. Presentation

Woohoo - presentation seemed to go really well. Ralf, Lorna and Petra all seemed to understand and like the idea (which is nice considering the time we have put into it). We also received some really neat comments / suggestions on things that we can improve.

• Features List - a place where we can inform people about the features introduced thus far and features to come. New and upcoming features can be rated - this will allow us to see which is most popular.
• Friends List - allow users to become friends which will increase the overall social aspect of the site.
• Instead of just rating a business, we need to add: rating and reviewing.

All the above mentioned suggestions are implementable - we just need the time. So we will have to see how we go.

So... What's New?

It's been a little while between posts - we've been busy getting this working along with the 3 other subjects we are doing this semester (one of which can be found here - Social and Mobile). So what has happened in the last 2 weeks - a lot!

• Add / Edit / Delete Businesses and Users complete
• Rating system complete
• Tagging system (business categories) complete
• Some Administration Features complete

Now there are only a few things left to do until presentation day - deploy to Dreamhost (our server), which I have heard is not an easy task! And some basic error checking - making sure sneaky people don't mess with our database!

Sept 2 - 10

Wow - this has been a really intense last 8 days! So much as happened / happened and been scratched! As with any new application (for me anyway - due to a lack of planning hehe) I had to restart at least once because I tried to do too much to quickly. I was trying to scale up without even a base to work on = disaster.

My first hurdle was working with REST - I have never done RESTful routes before and getting my head around how to use each one properly was hard, but it's for the greater good! Some features that were tried and scratched were 'ferret (full text) searching and paginating, mailers and many different tagging system (polymorph associations)'. All of these were thrown out because I couldn't get them working properly - maybe it was just me (more than likely) or I'd like to think that didn't apply properly to my models ( :) hehe).

So what is there - did I keep anything? Of cause! A basic searching system, users and businesses models, a tagging system and a rating system - all of which are fairly well integrated (working about 75%) so we're hoping to be right on track for presentations in about a month!

Sexy 'Web2.0' Style Star Rating System

Ok, as our system revolves around rating businesses it is no secret that this part of the site needs to be eye catching and easy to use! So I have scoured all the internets and found one that I'm rather impressed with.

Now ours doesn't have to look exactly like the example, I personally think maybe a change in the rollover color would be nice and bigger stars - bigger is better right? The CSS is fairly complex but oh well - it's workable. Here is the link out - CSS Star Rating Redux » Blog » Komodo Media - please leave comments letting me know what you think :) .