Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
In the process of renaming our website from MyFriendSuggests.com to theSUGGESTR.com I found that most articles on this refer to using mod_rewrite to accomplish the redirect. However for most us Java guys this may not be the way to go. I used URLRewrite to accomplish this name change and have ...
Posted in Java, Lessons Learned, Web Development, theSUGGESTR | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007
We are please to announce the official launching of MyFriendSuggests.com a social networking site that provides you personalized suggestions for restaurants, bars, clubs, doctors, grocery stores and just about anything else you can think of. Unlike other sites where you may find yourself digging through 100's of reviews from people who ...
Posted in MyFriendSuggests, Web Development | No Comments »
Saturday, June 16th, 2007
Tagging pages or items is a big part of the Web2.0 movement. After doing some mild searching I didn't find a prebuilt API for working with tags for Java (found some PHP stuff). So I created one to be used in the next release of our site (www.myfriendsuggests.com). As we've ...
Posted in Java, Web Development | 4 Comments »
Sunday, May 13th, 2007
I'm not much of a reader, but I just read a book Founders At Work, by Jessica Livingston. It's basically a bunch of interviews done with various people who led some of the biggest startups of the past 10-20 years. I found it to be a real interesting read especially ...
Posted in General Technology, Web Development, Website Marketing | No Comments »
Sunday, April 29th, 2007
This post builds on my previous post, in which we discuss how to scrape webmail sites for contacts. Yahoo! is by far the easiest of the sites to scrape (of the major sites). After you've sniffed the URLs used for the login you just need to replace the username and ...
Posted in Java, Scraping, Web Development | 2 Comments »
Sunday, April 29th, 2007
Many new websites, especially those that depend on social networks, are now offering ways to import contacts from various WebMail sites. I'm not going to go into the ethics of asking a user for their user name and password to a webmail site and scraping the site but I will ...
Posted in Java, Web Development, Website Marketing | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, April 25th, 2007
For the past few weeks I've been playing with Taste, a Java based framework for collaborative filtering (basically the recommendation feature found on sites like Amazon and Netflix). Hopefully in the near feature this tool will be incorporated in our site, MyFriendSuggests.com to improve our suggestion algorithms.
What I found was ...
Posted in Java, MyFriendSuggests, Taste, Web Development | No Comments »
Sunday, April 15th, 2007
This is probably old news to everyone but just in case there are other people like me out there I figured I would make this post.
When I started building my site, I began hand-coding a layout of HTML tables in my JSP code. That was definitely a mistake. Using HTML ...
Posted in Lessons Learned, Web Development | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007
After fighting with eclipse a little I was able to get my eclipse 3.2 running with WST to deploy my web application to the root context with Tomcat.
The trick was that I had to manually edit the file:
<Workspace>\<project>\.setting\org.eclipse.wst.common.component
I had to remove the value in the context root line so ...
Posted in Eclipse, Web Development | No Comments »
Sunday, April 1st, 2007
A few pieces of software I've worked on have required me to scrape data from existing websites. In general the code to do this is ugly. The way I had been doing it was using the standard java connectivity classes to grab the data from the site and then parsing ...
Posted in Java, Web Development | 3 Comments »
