Check out dishAdish to rate your favorite items at your favorite restaurants. You can also use dishAdish to find great dishes, like who serves the best burrito or what's the best dish at the Thai place down the street. Also check out dishAdish vegetarian for the best vegetarian selections.

Consolidated Blog

I have consolidated this blog to my BlueValhalla site. I will not maintain this blog any longer.

Search Engine Optimization

I've been working on a pseudo-web 2.0 page for a while with a friend of mine called dishAdish. The web site is a food review site focused on dish level reviews rather than just restaurant reviews. In any case, we developed the page from scratch using Ruby on Rails. It has been up for a while now and we're slowly starting to get more users, but it's a slow process. It seems like a lot of users come in from searches for misspelled food items. We seem to have reasonably high page ranking for misspelled words.

To increase our user base, we're starting to focus on various Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. It seems like the leading candidate is to get more incoming links to your site from other highly ranked pages. I'm not really sure how to go about doing this. Another area we need to improve is meta tags. At the moment we don't even use them, so we should be able to improve this pretty quickly.

We have a little widget that allows users to display the top dishes for a particular key word. We call it the Best Dishes widget. At some point I'd like to turn this into a widget which can be uses on other sites so people can take polls for, say, the best burrito. If we could enable people to add these to their blogs or MySpace page or something, that would definitely drive up links to our site.

WordPress for a Dummy

I set up a WordPress based blog on a different domain of mine. I would have been failry easy if my server wasn't so old. The version of MySQL on my server was too old for WordPress so I had to build a new version and run it separately. I had to keep the old MySQL around since it is used by a few other websites on the server. I didn't really know how to run two different versions, but a friend of mine, Ron, helped me get the MySQL server running. To do this we had to force the new version to run using different ports, sockets, log files, etc. Most of this was achieved with simple command line options during invocation. However, once I installed WordPress, I couldn't get it to connect to the database.

First of all, I had to find the right way to tell WordPress which MySQL server to connect to. This was achieved by adding the new port number in the server configuration (e. g. "localhost:12345" instead of just "localhost"). Even once I got this right, WordPress could not connect to the database. After trying many different things, I finally figured out the version of PHP WordPress was using was calling the older MySQL client. For the most part this shouldn't cause a problem except that the password hashing function changed from the older version to the newer one. Once I figured this out it was easy to remedy by resetting the passwords in the new database with the OLD_PASSWORD call to force the older style password hashing.

Now that I have the blog running I'll have to play around with plugins, templates, and other options. Sounds like fun, huh?

Real Alpha Geeks Don't Settle for iPhones

I've been keeping my eye on open source cell phones for a while now. After a few delays, Phase 1 of the OpenMoko based FIC neo1973 is finally available to developers. You can get the Neo Base kit ($300) for application developers, or the Neo Advanced kit ($450) which is dubbed the "hacker's dream box." OpenMoko bills itself as the first integrated open source mobile communications platform. Their tag line is "Free Your Phone." There is also a developer's portal called openmoko.org.

The software is based on a Linux 2.6 kernel, X11, Matchbox, GTK+ and KDrive with various layers added by the OpenMoko community. The hardware is based on a Samsung chipset and includes GSM/GPRS, AGPS, Bluetooth, USB and a 2.8" 480x640 touchscreen. The Phase 2/Mass Market hardware, set for release in October, will include a faster processor and WiFi.

There's another Linux based cell phone development platform that's been out for a while called the Greenphone. It's from Trolltech, the software company responsible for the Qt software framework. The Greenphone is based on a Linux 2.4 kernel and Qtopia, an embedded Linux device version of Qt. The Greenphone has a QVGA touchscreen, GSM/GPRS, Bluetooth, USB, and a 1.3 megapixel camera. The development phone device costs $695 and the software is available for the development community under a GNU GPL. The phone and software can be ordered from the Trolltech Web Shop. There is also a developer portal at qtopia.net. I don't believe the Greenphone is ever intended for the mass market, only as a reference platform.

Technorati Profile

iPhone-mania

The Apple iPhone is finally on the shelves. Well, I doubt you'll find any on the shelves because most stores probably sold out already. I knew it was going to be popular, but I didn't really think about how much so. It turns out one of my nieces drove 90 minutes in the early morning to line up at the Cleveland Apple Store. Her and her friend, Nick, were second in line and managed to get 2 iPhones each. Apparently they were paid for their efforts. The iPhone line up was blogged about on Cleveland's The Plain Dealer.

Dell Sells Ubuntu Computers

Dell is selling the Ubuntu based computers now. They have a web page describing them (as well as their FreeDOS versions) titled Ubuntu Has Arrived by Popular Demand. My friend Ron got an Ubuntu laptop already, and is pretty happy with it. It came with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) installed, and at the time was $50 cheaper than a similarly configured Windows Vista laptop. At the moment I think they cost the same.