Earlier this week I opened my web site UVFood.COM, the latest (well, second, not counting the blogs) Blue Forest Research site.

UVFood is a food reporting and review web site dedicated to food in the Connecticut River Upper Valley area of Vermont and New Hampshire (towns like Hanover, Lebanon, Norwich, White River Junction, Windsor, Quechee, Claremont, Enfield, Plainfield, Cornish and more). Currently its database is stuffed with restaurants but I’m slowly adding more non-restaurants to it as well; my goal is to get all the local food producers and retailers in it.

The software is still evolving as well; there are many social networking and blogging features to come to it, and I hope that it will come to a point where it will be a good piece of software to pick up and transplant to more urban areas.

Technically, it’s written in Perl using the Catalyst Framework and HTML::Mason; it uses the standard platform of Apache, MySQL and Linux.

It uses tags to help organize businesses. Rather than have categories or types of cuisines for restaurants, businesses are tagged. So a Chinese restaurant would have the tag “chinese”, and one of those odd hybrid Chinese restaurant/sushi bars would also carry the tag for “sushi”, as would any Japanese restaurants and any markets that sell sushi. Click on the “sushi” tag and you get a quick list of all your alternative sources for raw fish. Eventually you might get a blog article or two on sushi as well. At this time tags are only “editorial”, put in by the system administrators (me) but my aim is to allow all users to tag as well.

The site is aggressively RSS-ified, with feeds spouting out of it all over the place (I’m still working on enabling some of these). So if you want to embed in your web site the top-rated local restaurants, or the newest restaurants, or your list of favorite restaurants, or your list of what you’ve been rating and reviewing recently, you can do that. Or you can easily keep track of where your friends are eating, or any updates to a particular restaurant or your list of favorites.

We also support Microformats - Microformats use classes to tag HTML-encapsulated data on the page with semantics. In this case, we support hCard to allow you to easily grab the relevant info for the business from the page and get it into your address book. I’ll write up more about Microformats in another blog entry. We also support vCard downloads, which effectively do the same thing.

There’s a lot to do. Web sites need a lot of supporting material, and one thing I really need to work on is a tutorial for UVFood. People who are Web 2.0-savvy should hopefully find it easy to use but people who will likely not realize a lot of what it can do for them, and may not even get how to use it.

I’ll be marketing it slowly - first, word of mouth. I don’t want a sudden rush of users. I want to bring in a few users (outside of my initial testers) slowly and as I gain confidence that it’s operating properly, start to post about it online or do some offline promotion, maybe even advertise it.

For now it’s supported only by Google ads and by Amazon affiliate links. I have no idea how those will perform. I’ve been disappointed by the affiliate link performance in my blogs (the links that I use in blog articles seem to perform well but the boxes which look like ads in the sidebar don’t).

 Email This Post |  Print This Post