San Francisco’s Random Taco Crawl Generator

For those of you close to me, you have definitely heard about a small side project I started at the end of May called the Random Taco Crawl Generator.  I dreamed up this great idea of being able to query a website for a random sampling of taquerias in San Francisco while I was at the gym over memorial day weekend.  The night before I had been on a Taco Crawl for my friend Kevin’s birthday.  He had held a few before, but this was my first with him, and with almost 20 other people that joined in for the celebration!

While we were sitting stuffed at our 5th taqueria, one of Kevin’s friends pondered aloud “I wonder if tacocrawl.com is taken.”  Everyone in ear shot with an iPhone started scouring the internet to see if the domain had been secured, and then to see if they, themselves, could secure the domain.  As I watched them scramble, I wondered too, “Why don’t you just call GoDaddy?  They have a horrible UI, but great phone service.” (I really am a true believer).  They ignored me!  I speculated, this time silently, it was because they didn’t want to listen to a girl (because guys know so much more about tech then us females, clearly).

Finally, I decided to grab GoDaddy’s phone number (on my blackberry, mind you) and give them a call.  Sure enough the domain was available, they had my account number and credit card on file, and I had the domain signed, sealed, and delivered within 5 minutes.  Everyone was dumbfounded for two reasons:

1. It didn’t occur to anyone (except for me) that you could secure a domain name by phone.
2. No one thought that any two-word combination was still even available in the domain space.

So while I was at the gym the following day, I was thinking about what I could do with my new domain.  Around that same time I decided I wanted to start getting back into more interactive web-development (pages that do things, not just show information).  For the past few years, my day job has confined me to strictly requirements and design, but no development.  Even with a few of my side projects – including this website, The General History Project, and The Bead Store – I hadn’t really written an if() or while() statement, in a while.

What started as a fun challenge to see who could secure the domain www.TacoCrawl.com fastest, turned into a side project using the Yelp API.  I wrote most of the logic in PHP, but sprinkled some jQuery and XML throughout the site.  The basic idea is that I query Yelp for as many taquerias within a 2 mile radius of the neighborhood selected.  I check to see if the data set returned to me is greater or less than the number of taquerias the user requested.  Ideally, the data set is greater, so I can generate a set of random numbers, and select from the full array of taquerias randomly.  If the data set is less than the number of taquerias the user requested, than I return to the user all the taquerias Yelp returned to me.

All in all, once I got back into the swing of things, I found the Yelp API to be really easy to work with, and the google group to be very helpful. I also started using this handy tool for cross-browser design – check out Browser Shots.

In the process, I got a lot of really great feedback through uservoice and email.  Some people want to see the site extend to other food genres, other cities and mobile browsers.  Other food genres are hard because few delicacies are small and edible repeatedly in crawl fashion the way tacos can be consumed.  For other cities, I checked in my own home town, Philadelphia, and only one neighborhood Yelp lists in its API has enough taquerias to make a taco crawl possible.  Finally, there’s no excuses, mobile browsing capability would be great, and so would a google map mash-up.  The truth is, I want to eat tacos, not program tacos; I need a break!  I want to work on other things!

Andale! Go find you some tacos!

PS:  There’s an easter egg in the program.  I’d like to know who finds it!

UPDATE:

Finding a Place for my HAMB Background Image

In my previous post. I wrote about HAMB SF, my idea for a neighborhood workout group in Russian Hill and Nob Hill.  I showed you a couple of the website designs that I played around with, all using this basic image:

The Original HAMB SF Background Image

If you are not familiar with San Francisco, the left building is Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill and the right building is the Transamerica building downtown; I can see both of these from my apartment.

I have yet to write Part 2 of my post on HAMB SF, but you might be able to guess that the project idea is on hold for various reasons.  That being said, I wanted to use this background image and some of the other photoshop collateral I created for something else.  Since I don’t really use MySpace, or care to, I needed another venue where I could post a customized background.  I decided on Twitter.

I removed the HAMB header and added a few clouds, as well as a notation that attributed the background to me.  Here’s how the background looks alone:

My San Francisco Twitter Background

I had to change the dimensions of the file, as well as increase the depth of the hill at the bottom to adjust for different browser sizes.  Of course, depending on how a viewer’s browser is adjusted, the background may look a little off.

Here’s how it looks when the sizing is just right:

My Background on Twitter

Twitter Updates for 2008-12-20

• signing up for ubuntu forums so I can finally resolve my network connection issues. #
• maybe someone out there can help me? http://tinyurl.com/9gqau5 #
• RT @NeoSWF The Ultimate Web Developer’s Christmas Wish List 1. http://cli.gs/gPADhQ 2. http://cli.gs/z0aBUX #

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Follow ITSkillShop on Twitter

Follow us on twitter as we get ready for the competition this weekend. Twitter address is: http://twitter.com/itskillshop

Debbie and I are hard at work putting together a kick-ass presentation with metaphors and analogies galore.