Essentially, the BetterOmaha site is a news aggregator for the Omaha metro area, bringing in news from all of the relevant major local news sources (Omaha.com, KETV, WOWT, The Reader, etc), as well as local blogers who are writing great things. Think of is as Google News.. but just for Omaha.

Additionally, we are providing an Omaha Restaurant guide… with the hopes of being the most comprehensive, most usable, and all-around best looking restaurant guide for Omaha on the internet.

So, thats it! Exciting eh? You may be asking yourself… so Dusty, whats the big deal? Fair question…. The big deal is the approach that we take with our site…

We are 100% about the user

Basically, we are building this site for the users first, and for advertisers second. We want it to be not only the most useful site for Omaha information, but also the most usable. That means you’ll never find popup ads on our site. That means that our restaurant section is COMPREHENSIVE, even if a restaurant hasn’t paid to be a “featured listing”. That means that we provide commenting and reviews on everything, even if it might detract from advertising appeal.

Not only that, I think our site *looks* pretty darn good. And that folks, goes a LONG way…

All in all, I’ve sooooo incredibly proud of what the three interns (Allyn, Robert & Erin#2) did this summer. Kevin and I couldn’t be happier. I think its quite safe to say that BrightMix’s first annual summer internship was a smashing success. Not only in the product we produced, but also in the fun that we had, and the all around experience. I can only hope that you the reader had as much fun following along, as we had being in the midst of it.

So thats it… head on over to http://www.betteromaha.com, and sign yourself up for a beta key! We’re letting in a few people per day, so be patient. If you have any feedback at all, or questions, please don’t hesitate to ask… send an email to info [at] betteromaha [dot] com…

This is likely the last post on the good old Feisty Piranha Project blog.. for more information about BrightMix, of course you can follow us over at

http://www.brightmix.com

or, to keep up to date with the developments happening on BetterOmaha.com, you can follow the BetterOmaha blog at

http://blog.betteromaha.com

Cheers and we’ll see you again next year for our next internship!

I certainly haven’t spent my summer researching the occurances of multiple Erins in small businesses, but I my gut says it’s a rare thing.  A summer’s worth of turning my head, only to find that the speaker was referring to someone else, says it’s also confusing.

Fortunately, the confusion has been worth it.  Erin #2 and I have been able to transform this potential chaos into a true learning experience.  What did we learn about?  Erins, of course!  For example, did you know that Erins enjoy gardening?  I always thought it was a personal preference, but I now know that I am predisposed to enjoy gardening because I am an Erin!  Below are just a few fun facts about Erins.

Fun Facts About Erins (Applies to all Erins)

BrightMix is 28.6% powered by Erins

Erins Love:
Coffee, Artichokes, Eggplants, Hummus, Volkswagens, Teva sandals, and the UserName “Erin”

Erins Don’t Love:

maggots, corporate work environments

Erins Agree to Disagree On:
Hollandaise high-heeled flip flops, and whether or not to eat meat

What: BarCamp Omaha
Where: Frost Acres – 96th & State St.
When: August 15 (Evening social gathering), 16th (Sessions all day), and 17th (Sunday breakfast + maybe a few sessions)

For all the details, and to sign up, check out http://www.barcampomaha.org

I’ve been calling myself a ‘psuedo-intern’. I’m not even really an intern, although that’s what I interviewed for. (By the way; best interview ever. Hour-and-a-half flew by. Only seemed like hour-and-a-quarter. ) But I have been working on other sweet projects that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed.

So, now that the summer internship is almost over, I think I’ll reflect… on coffee.

It’s a long standing joke that internships are all about making coffee. This has been true for me. Erin#2 and I have been the main coffee makers all summer. Erin#1 started out that way (she’s usually the first person here) but soon decided to quit caffiene, so Erin #2 & I were left to fend for ourselves. Allyn drinks coffee too, but I’d rather drink doctors office fishtank water strained through a coal miner’s dirty sock than have his coffee. But the other day he got a thermos that looks like a mortar shell and holds more than a water tower. I’m jealous.

We drank Dunkin Donuts original blend until the Costco 33 gallon bag it came in was depleted. Then Erin#1 made a suggestion that brought us new horizon and higher state of consciousness: Starbucks Kopelani blend. Even the pixels spelling the name here taste good.

I’m not a Starbuzz-only guy by any means. I like the other roasters; especially local. But this was incredible. “These hand-selected beans are then roasted to bring out a juicy, crisp taste. And with a hint of citrus flavor you’ll experience the refreshing taste of Hawaii in every sip.” Wow. I kinda wish I’d been a writer for coffee descriptions instead of a crummy designer. (Another fun gig would have been to come up with paint color names. ‘Salmon in the Mist’. ‘Warm Fuzzy Philanthropy Yellow’. ‘Aromatic Fresh Baked Sugar Cookies Beige’. Etc.)

Bummer that Kopelani only lasted a month then Barstucks switched to a new flav-o-the-month and I haven’t found it again. Then I recommended my home brew of choice: Millstone Foglifter - a great blend of light and dark roasts - a bite like Columbian with the robust earthy flavor of Sumatra.

So it’s been a great summer of hot coffee in the morning & iced in the afternoon. With half-n-half and raw sugar, of course.

Challenge: Next time you talk about coffee, use the words ‘bright’, ‘earthy’, ‘aromatic’, and ‘floral notes’ in one sentance. Email me for a prize. Yay!

As such, we’re readying up for the launch of the FPP application. As dusty mentioned, we’re launching it next Saturday, August 16th at Barcamp Omaha.

We’ve set ourselves a goal to have the application ready for launch by Wednesday of next week. This will hopefully give us some slack time if we need it (crosses fingers). Of course, there’s a boatload of bugs, unfinished features, and other misc loose ends. Needless to say, this last week will be pretty dang busy.

To aid them in their effort, we provided some delicious, nutritious Nestlé Crunch Bars (it was Allyn’s idea).

Will the interns pull through? Can they take the heat? Stay tuned to find out!

{
text-transform: lowercase;
font-variant: small-caps;
}

the first letter of each world will be a full-size cap, even though you specifically stated all letters should be lowercase. How terribly terrible. So you’ll have to do this instead:

{
text-transform: uppercase;
font-size: 8px; /* specify a size a bit smaller than the non-"small-caps" letters */
}

Yeah, not that big of a deal…except that now the code is conceptually describing the style incorrectly. Whatever.

Today has gone decently. I’m working on refining the search on a specific part of our site, and it’s getting complicated. I fondly remember yesterday around this time when Dusty suggested I implement these changes, and I said “Ok, but that’s going to take a while.” He responded with something like ‘Oh, it won’t take that long’. I disagreed, and here we sit. A full 24 hours later and I’m not even close to being done.

Dusty: 0
Allyn : 1

What I’m trying to do is essentially teach SQL the same sort of inheritance many modern languages have. ActiveRecord doesn’t do this kind of inheritance right now, but it does do single table inheritance. Single Table inheritance is nice because it reduces the amount of joins one must do on a query, thus letting the query operate a bit faster. That’s all well and dandy, but we’re using Ruby here - the whole concept of which is to make things as easy for the programmer as possible, speed be damned*. I’m not fond of single table inheritance for this situation. I’d really like class inheritance, because I really don’t like the idea of having properties of a subclass in the table of it’s parent. By don’t really like, I mean to say hate with a passion. Anywho, the first one is easy, but the second one is anything but trivial.

Other then that little issue, the day has gone pretty well. Tonight there’s a shingding at a local bar-thing. I’m not that excited about the bar-thing itself, but hopefully the company will be entertaining.

* While this may be true, the reality of course is that we’re making a website, and the interwebs is the land of impatience. Thus, Robert and I are in fact quite concerned with the speed of our application.

I’m talking about search. I decided to leave it for one the last things to take care of because it’s better to know all the types of content that will need to be searched before you go ahead and design a search.

Search is a pretty common feature in websites and web apps these days, and it’s sad that most search result pages are unattractive, don’t match the rest of the site and contain lots of sponsored results. We’re not all Google, people. So basically, most of them were pretty horrendous; here’s a few that stood out as “not horrendous.”

It is a little known fact that Brightmix uses Campfire for office chat. Despite the fact that we are all within an earshot of one another, everyone still uses it to pass messages back and forth. Although, the conversations are not always… productive, it still has a lot of valuable information (Like SVN integration)

Campfire itself has a lot of features, like file uploads, integrated pictures and YouTube videos, and so on. If you really want a list of features, check out their website.

Probably my favorite, undocumented feature, of Campfire is using the @ in chat to auto-complete someones name. It is something I have found myself using in other chats besides Campfire, just to find that it does not complete their name for me!

Although, it does not always work in our Campfire because we get rather creative with our names from time to time with characters that are not on my keyboard.

Anyways, it was been mentioned a while back that campfire has turned into a cesspool ever since “The Interns” arrived. Being that we’re computer scientists, Allyn and I took it upon ourselves to actually see if this was true by measuring the increase in the number of campfire messages since our arrival.

To do this, we wrote a little Ruby application that would go through the transcripts of all Campfire messages and count ‘em up! We actually started coding this (and completed it) after our second day of work at BrightMix from Allyn’s apartment, and we didn’t even have internet at the time. We wrote the whole parser from four saved html files that we grabbed while we were at work.

Of course, we were not to familiar with Ruby at the time since we had literally started using it 2 days prior; as a result, we ran into some problems. We ended up going to a gas station down the street from us, Cubby’s, which offers free WiFi and we looked up the solutions to our problems, then returned to Allyn’s apartment.

We hacked at it the rest of the night, and by the next morning we had a “workable” version of the application. Though, it was not without its problems. The graph had issues showing up correctly, the parser wouldn’t work if you were on an admin account (Allyn and I just have normal accounts and we were not expecting some changes in the UI that admin accounts have), and there were a few timeout issues.

We fixed these bugs… and there the script sat in my Documents folder for about two months.

Last night I finally decided to clean up the graph display (we use Google Charts) so that it would be in a more postable form! Winner.

So, without any more delay… I present, the Campfire Spider.

It requires that you have Ruby installed, and you can use it as follows:

ruby campfire_spider.rb campfire_subdomain username password

So, if your campfire site was “brightmix.campfirenow.com”, your username was “bill@brightmix.com”, and your password was “omg123″, you would run:

ruby campfire_spider.rb brightmix bill@brightmix.com omg123

After you type in this command and it works (It will throw an exception if your login information was wrong), it will likely take anywhere from five to 500 minutes to complete. So, grab some food, or find a fun flash game to play - I don’t care what you do - just let it run. When it finishes, it spit out two URLs in your console. One will be the raw-google-charts URL… It’s kind of long and epic, so the second URL is a TinyURL version of the google-charts URL.

You can then open that up in your favorite browser, and there will be a graph of Time vs Messages.

In case you were wondering, this is the Brightmix campfire usage graph:

Hope it works for you! Let me know if you run into any problems.

Download Campfire Spider here!

PS: If you look closely at the graph, campfire usage has gone up… but does that mean the quality of messages went down? I don’t know, maybe version 2.0 will have a signal vs noise detector.