So the first official SiteAMonth site is done and launched. Although April will be spent promoting it, I’ll take this post to summerize the site development process.

Languages:
PHP, Javascript

Database:
MySQL

Open Source Software Used:
moo.fx, modified FeedCreator class

Technologies:
AJAX, RSS, Amazon’s Web Services

My first time working with:
Ajax, RSS, Amazon’s Web Services, Javascript effects, Apache’s Mod Rewrite

Popularity: 7% [?]

I finally hashed out the Bloglines red ! bug.  It was a tough one.  Amazon has a limit of 1 request/second/IP through their API.   I had been building the feeds on the fly and keeping a six hour cache.  But when Bloglines would want all the feeds refreshed at the time I would go over my Amazon limit and cause the feeds to choke.  I fixed this by writing a small background task that ran from cron and refreshed active feeds periodically.  This meant that when Bloglines would hit my server it could use the cached feeds.  This one was a pain to figure out.

I also switched to this modified version of FeedCreator.  I’ve dropped support for Atom .3 and added Atom 1.0.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Bloglines keeps giving the little red ! next to the RSStalker feeds. This means they think the feed is invalid. Of course the feed looks valid to me and Feed Validator. From looking at the Apache logs I’m guessing it has something to do with Bloglines trying to refresh 100+ feeds in a 2-3 second time period.

Popularity: 5% [?]

So I saw this post on the official Amazon Web Services blog and kind of panicked. Ten days before I’m ready to roll out RSStalker Amazon announces they have added RSS feeds for wishlists. Once I settled down I realized the intent was different. Their service was more for people to include their wishlists in their blog and maybe monitor their buddies wishlists. Still this was a good post to ride for some free publicity so I posted in the comments about RSStalker.com.

The site isn’t exactly ready, but it is pretty usable. However, I wasn’t expecting for Jeff (the guy who writes the AWS blog) to dedicate a post or RSStalker. He emailed me as well and seems like a great guy. In addition to handling the AWS Blog he also runs www.syndic8.com and wrote www.headlineviewer.com. So you could say he’s a guy whose see the value in RSS as a technology.

Popularity: 5% [?]

The overall site design was killing me. I couldn’t come up with anything good that fit the concept of the site, both in terms of its function and the sliding effect. Then it hit me. I was generating buttons to be used on the site when I realized I could take the mini button, and blow it up into a banner. I could also stretch them to use as section headers for the sliding areas. I think it came out pretty cool.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I’ve decided that tracking single products is great, but tracking whole wishlists would be killer.  So I’m adding wishlist tracking and category tracking.  Since I’m already pulling in the data for the products, it make it easy to generate feeds based on category (DVDs, books, …).  There is also going to be a mother of all feeds for all price changes.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I’ll be using the FeedCreator PHP class to generate the actual XML. The project seems a bit old, the last version was released Oct 2004, but it still seems valid. This will save me a ton of trouble putting the feeds together.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Thanks to moo.fx for the javascript library that I’ll be using to generate a cool sliding effect. They also have an AJAX lib, which doesn’t seem as complete (no catch on failure) as some out there, but its small and since I’m using their other lib I’ll probably use that one too.

Popularity: 4% [?]

This months site is RSStalker.com. RSStalker is a tool that generates RSS feeds that track price changes on Amazon.com. Pricing information will be provided via Amazon’s Web Services. This will be the first time I’ll be using Amazon’s API, but it seems pretty straighforward. They use REST and return XML formatted data. To up the degree of difficulty I’ll be using AJAX for the first time. I’m pretty sure that the whole site will just be one page, where the user enters in an ASIN (Amazon’s product code) and they get back a link to a feed.

Popularity: 5% [?]