Blue Forest Blog

Announcing UVFood.COM

Friday, August 31st, 2007

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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Posted in Apache, Business, Catalyst, HTML::Mason, Perl | No Comments »

Embedding Geographic Information in Web Pages

Saturday, July 14th, 2007

The main project I’m currently working on is a web site about food in the area I live in. It’s currently in testing and I’m quite a bit further behind on fixing it up to the point of opening it to the world than I’d like to be.

One feature that’s important to me to have in it is to mark pages that are associated with restaurants or other food-related organizations with their coordinates.

It turns out that there are several different ways to do this.

I’m currently using META tags in the HEAD section to specify geo.position, like this:

<head>
<meta name="geo.placename" content='Quechee, VT' />
<meta name='geo.position' content='43.645995,-72.416711' />
</head>

There are at least three other ways to do this:
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Posted in HTML | No Comments »

Where to Get Feed Icons?

Friday, March 23rd, 2007

You’re working on a web site and you need some icons for your feeds - now! After all, what web site in 2007 doesn’t have at least one feed? Yes, yes, you can always go to someone else’s web site and grab their icons - if you’re really unscrupulous you’ll link directly to them until they notice and redirect your link to goatse.

But if you want a variety of feed icons in a variety of formats (including Photoshop), the place to go is - ta da! - http://www.feedicons.com/.

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Posted in Graphics | No Comments »

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