Shady Project

Geographic Product Finder

Posted by Shady Mon, 05 May 2008 05:30:00 GMT

So, another school project of mine ends up on the web: WorldBuy. It started life as my final project for CSE486 (Distributed Systems) but I liked it so much I decided to put it online.

Basically, you can click on a region and it will give you some general information about where you clicked. You can then search amazon for products related to that area. Products can be saved per region, and ranked so that a user can see what other people think are good products for a given place.

It's very, very, very beta at the moment. No user accounts, no per user places or products, and the search itself isn't particularly refined, but I think there is a lot of potential here.

It is also serving as a testbed for the new features I added to the geonames rubygem I wrote about in a previous blog post. The site makes use of both the paid account support, and the country info method. I made a custom rubygem with the new geonames features, and this site currently uses that.

I have a bunch of plans for features to add to this site, and I intend to keep working on this site. If you use it and like it, or don't like it, let me know!

Posted in School, GIS, Mapping, Cartography, Development, Ruby | Tags amazon, geography, schoolproejct | 1 comment | no trackbacks

Geonames Gem

Posted by Shady Sat, 03 May 2008 03:30:00 GMT

The geonames ruby gem is a really useful piece of software that makes it super easy to query the geonames web services. I just used it in a distributed systems project (more on that later) and I found it to be great. Today, however, in a fit of "oh-sweetjesus-the-server-is-down-before-my-demo" panic, I ended up purchasing some credits for the commercial geonames service, only to find that the geonames gem doesn't actually have the facility to use the paid service. So I added the functionality myself. It was actually pretty simple (the it only required changes to two files) and I think it could be used by more people then just myself who have a paid geonames account.

The two patches are attached to this article, and also posted on the issues page for the gem at google code.

I'm also working on adding support for the countryInfo webservice in the gem.

Stay tuned.

Posted in Ruby | Tags gem, geonames, patch, ruby