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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vCard is a specification for representing contact information. It’s used to move information between address books in a non-proprietary format, and to download or even upload contact information from web sites.

Apple’s Macintosh Address Book supports vCard as an export and import format as does Microsoft Outlook.

A vCard can contain things like addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, even photographs.

I’m working on a web site which stores contact information for businesses and I want to be able to make that information available to my users in vCard format. So… I’m coding in Perl. There are two Perl packages that look helpful - Net::vCard and Text::vCard. It turns out that Text::vCard is a more recent version of the same codebase as Net::vCard.

Text::vCard provides methods for creating a vCard and setting the data it contains. You can then create an address book using Text::vCard::Addressbook and use its export function to get the actual vCard text.
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