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.
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I’ll be using this blog to share information about software development I’m involved in. Most of my work currently involves developing web sites using either Wordpress for blogs or the combination of Perl, MySQL, HTML::Mason and the Catalyst Framework for Perl. Partly this blog is for me; by writing down things I’m using I’ll help myself remember them and have a good resource to fall back on when I forget them. Partly it’s for you; I hope that by sharing some of the things that I find as I work on my projects will be helpful to other people.

Some of what I’ll get into here will be how to structure your web site so that it plays well with others - Google is the obvious target, but Technorati and general search engine optimization are important too, as well as how to use AJAX techniques appropriately. I’ll also talk about security issues (which can be very interesting when you’re utilizing AJAX)

I’ll talk about how to monetize your work, primarily through the use of Google Adsense, the Amazon Associates program, and Linkshare, which administers affiliate programs for a very large number of companies including Apple and the iTunes store.

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