Run Away Coder » Dev In Progress

My Game Buddy 0.5

jameel — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:13:41 +0000

New Version released :

Improved loading times.
Permission Acquired to use site data
Added better error handling for I.E. and Firefox
Increased amount of data loaded from Zaps
Misc other back end fixes

Keep the comments comming , thanks to those that commented already.

My Game Buddy 0.4

jameel — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:53:50 +0000

Ok finally updated the website to 0.4 , users can now search the respective sites live and data will be loaded.

Please note that data is only taken from the respective sites every 8 hours to prevent dos attacks. The rest of the time the data will be loaded from the database.

Also comments are now live and active , any comments sent will be sent to me.

Please leave a comment here if you have any other idea or such.

Making your mark

jameel — Thu, 15 May 2008 05:50:30 +0000

So not to long ago (a few months back) i created a web application that would allow me to track my fuel usage. While the application was pretty much public i never really announced it or blogged about it either. The reason for this was that while it worked fine , the application lacked polish and i had not implemented all the feature’s that i had intended to implement .

So a funny thing happened yesterday, while browsing through my list of rss feeds i came across a feed on Web Worker Daily about an application that basically did the same thing as mine but with a lot less functionality .The difference was that they had a lot more polish for the product (fuelfrog) with all the nice colors and stuff attached .Thinking back if had polished the app a bit more who knows it might have got a bit more limelight (provided i could come up with a better name than fuletracker).

So does it come down to who releases there product first or is it more about who has the best looking product. I know this is a 2 sided coin because a lot of the general public like i pretty product that is less functional more than a ugly more functional product.

So to all those that did not know i have a released a semi beta/alpha fuel tracking application that will allow you to track the mileage and a bunch of other stuff , so there i said it.

Now lets just hope my other ideas don’t get taken by other people.

Scraping The Surface

jameel — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:58:42 +0000

Needs and ease of use is the basis for a lot of developments in this world, so since i had a need and i needed to do it easily i decided to start a small project that will hopefully obtain both for me.

The need : To buy games (if possible at the cheapest price)

Ease Of Use : To do it from one common location.

Before going and creating the app and wasting my most valuable time i did some research. This did not turn out very promising as there was about 1 site(www.pricecheck.co.za) that was able to do what i wanted very basically ,but they did not cover games well and almost not at all at times.Also i needed a location that covered local distributors.

So after finding nothing at all i decided to start with the app and see how far i could go. Well as of now as i write this post i have managed to scrape 3 sites successfully ,kalahari and take 2 for new games and zaps for used games. I have tried to get data from BT Games Site but have been unsuccessful so far.

While there is still a lot to do i now have to power to compare results from 3 different sites at one location.When game hunting this is absolutely useful.

Also the only results that i return are xbox 360 games its not that much different if i needed to integrate other platforms.

If you have any idea please let me know and i will integrate them as i get the time.