grubblog

We're legit!!

2006-10-23T21:31:00.000-04:00

It's been a long time since that fateful day when the idea was born, but we've finally hit the big time. Ok, so it's not really the "big time," but we were casually mentioned at philly.com the other day. Interestingly, we've been in touch with the owner of the other website mentioned and we're looking at ways to team up.

Since the official launch, we've been trying to fix a lot of the minor annoyances that seem to be popping up. But don't worry- we're still working on some major upgrades to make your dining experience that much better.

As always, you can shoot me an e-mail with comments or suggestions at dave@cityjoints.com.

-friedman

Solid Day's Work

2006-08-11T17:44:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Dave and I spent the better part of the day cleaning up a few bugs on the site. Dave made a really nice upgrade to the search box, so that should work much better for you. I also added some user stats pages, which you can find here.

The other major issue we tackled was our identity crisis--it seems not many people, besides Dave and myself, like the name, or can even pronounce, Gruburge. So we're throwing around a couple of new names, and are also just considering splitting it to make it a little more obvious: GrubUrge. If anyone has suggestions or feedback about the current name (and it's capitalization), let us know.

our new locale

2006-07-05T21:19:00.000-04:00

Once again, Gruburge has changed its official programming headquarters. For those who didn't know, we started out at Cosi. It was there, that the prediction algorithm was first brought into existence. As the summer came into fruition, we moved our programming headquarters to Cafe Mocha where it turns out that Dr. Kannan's daughter is working. Cafe Mocha treated us well, truly bringing Gruburge into its beta stages.

Being the adventuresome grubbers that we are, we have found a new place of programming with delicious drinks to serve as our caffeinated muse - The ChapterHouse Cafe & Gallery. What can I say beyond free wireless and live music?

Choco Tacos

2006-06-25T02:05:00.000-04:00

There was only one night this week I slept before 3 am, and I'm not sure what night that was. We've got lots of new features coming out soon (including, Shira, some things that will make pagination easier). Expect to see something big this week.

Now I think I'll treat myself to an early night's sleep.
--
ark

ps: trying to serialize objects in php sucks. roll your own and save some headaches.

And shira, thanks for the choco tacos. A perfect midnight snack.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

2006-06-17T01:25:00.000-04:00

Who gets the shout out of the day? Shira. Why? Because when ark and I were starting to drag after 7 hours of straight programming (ok, there was some grilling in the middle), Shira came through with midnight cookies. And milk.

We've got lots of good things just about to happen. Geobrowsing. Hundreds of new restaurants in Philadelphia. New Grubcities. That's right, we're on the verge of letting some lucky grubbers in other cities start to rate their favorite spots. It's going to huge!

Oh, and let us know how you like the new front page!

-friedman

Here we come world!

2006-06-13T10:48:00.000-04:00

We're just about ready to unleash multiple grub-cities. It's taken a lot of work to make sure that everything will make sense, but it looks like the pieces are about to fall in place. So travelers, rest assured that if you find yourself in NY, LA, or even Wichita (well, maybe not there), we'll have some predictions generated just for you tastes.

On another note, we'd like to give a shout out to Beker (of www.beker.com fame) who has been instrumental in the graphic design of the site. Maybe we'll take him out for a Guiness to say thanks.

-friedman

Feed Me

2006-05-24T15:43:00.000-04:00

We just added links to a bunch of RSS feeds for the site, so now you can subscribe to keep up to date with the newest restaurants and recent activity on gruburge. Or you can subscribe to your friends' pages to find out where they've been eating. Hope you enjoy it.

ark

p.s.

Dave has some mad cool tricks up his sleeve, so look out for some awesome new features in the near future.

Tell us what you think

2006-05-20T09:34:00.000-04:00

We've got a elephantine sized list of major and minor changes to the site, but we're always open to new suggestions. Layout, content, new features, whatever! We're here to make your grubbing experience the best it can be. Just send us an email at admin at gruburge dot com.

--friedman

You've Got an Open Invitation

2006-05-18T17:44:00.000-04:00

Dave and I just fixed a bunch of bugs and finally opened up registration--you no longer need an invitation code to signup. So now the millions ( ;) ) of visitors we have every day who have been begging us for invitations can now create accounts, rate restaurants, get predictions, and contribute to the site's content. Enjoy.

--ark

Updates

2006-05-05T14:43:00.000-04:00

I've been working for a while now trying to clean up the css throughout the site, fix a bunch of things that don't look quite right in IE, and fix general bugs (like broken links, misnomers, etc.). I just finished a batch of them last night, and rolled them over to the live site this afternoon. I've got some more in the works, but I wanted to push these out now because they include some significant fixes.

Another major revision in this update is a fix to our predictions algorithm that was screwing up result sets for searches and tag browsing. All is well now that I have changed a few JOINs to LEFT JOINs and moved some stuff from WHERE to ON clauses.

Back to fixing bugs for a few weeks--then, expect to see some added functionality.

--ark

Recommendation Tweaks

2006-04-20T16:42:00.000-04:00

While we were tweaking our recommendations algorithm, a bug seems to have snuck in. You may see some funny looking predictions, but don't worry--we're working on fixing everything right now.

ark

Cleaning up our act

2006-04-19T21:46:00.000-04:00

We're in the process of cleaning up all of the little details that have been left behind. Smooth, sleek, easy-to-use interface. Just wait until you see the search results! I'm not going to say more, but keep searching and you're going to be pleasantly surprised quite soon....

-friedman

A (pretty major) Bug

2006-04-14T15:10:00.000-04:00

Luthfiya brought to my attention a pretty major bug with our predictions algorithm which was causing all result sets for users who haven't rated anything to return empty. I think this bug may have crept in when we were tweaking the mother function. So for those of you who logged in for the first time and were nonplussed (with good reason), try logging again and playing around, cause we've fixed the bug. Please let us know if you have any other problems.

--ark

Server Updates and I Love Blogger

2006-04-07T19:46:00.000-04:00

I've gotten the blog working properly again--simply a path issue in our publish settings on blogger. Did I mention how much I love blogger? It's simply amazing, one of the best services on web in my opinion. When I first set up a personal blog, just to check it out, I thought it was cool but didn't fully appreciate it. Later, after setting up about five more blogs there, I realized why I kept coming back.

1. The interface follows the KISS principle. Posting is easy and the rich text editor is just powerful enough without being bloated.
2. Templates are brilliant. The blogger template system allows you to completely customize the look and feel of your blog if you know CSS and HTML, or gives you a bunch of nice templates to choose from if you don't or just want to spend your time elsewhere.
3. Publish your blog to your own server. This is how our blog is at gruburge.com/blog/ and not a blogspot address.
4. It's free. You just need a little button linking back to blogger somewhere on your blog that looks like this:

Blogger is just too easy and too awesome not to use.

In other news, I think Dave fixed all of the PHP warnings and notices that were getting spit into the error log, so our code is now superclean and hopefully you won't get any bugs with the current setup.

--ark

Server snafus and sorbet snacks

2006-04-06T16:24:00.000-04:00

Like so many other things, this server port has taken a bit longer than we thought. It seems we may have lost a few blog posts along the way which makes us wonder if we lost any of your ratings, too. It sure sounds like a good excuse to go rate a bunch of new restaurants. Kudos to one of our newest gruburgers, Cong, who has been adding restaurants like there's no tomorrow! --friedman

We're moving along!

2006-04-01T21:21:00.000-05:00

After learning a few new words like "@#$%^" and "@$*%!", the new server is finally up and we should be loading the site onto it any day now. We'll try to minimize the down time, but bear with us if we hit a snag. Trust us, though, it'll be worth it. We're going to have the ability to roll out a number of improvements that have been happening behind the scenes as well as start to work on some new and exciting features. In the meantime, keep rating and keep grubbing. --friedman

The Haps at Gruburge

2006-03-29T12:18:00.000-05:00

For those of you wondering why there haven't been any big new feature additions on gruburge lately, it's because we're working on upgrading our server. We've got a bigger, better machine, and we're just setting everything up. It should allow us to do some cool stuff we couldn't do on the shared host we had been using, so look out for new features soon.

Other than that, I played with the search results formatting a little bit, and you can now use the search box to find tags. Plus, we'll show you if restaurant search results matched your query with the tags they have.

Also, Cong and kriti were requesting that we make an 'add restaurant' button, but I think we're gonna keep things the way they are. To add a restaurant right now, you just click on the link at the bottom of a search page that says 'add a new restaurant named X.' I've highlighted to make it more obvious. The idea, though, is that there shouldn't be an 'add restaurant' button by itself, because how are you going to know it's not already on gruburge unless you search for it and can't find it?

Anyway, Dave's plugging away at the server, so that should be up soon. More good things to come.

Better Browsing, Better Search

2006-03-09T17:06:00.000-05:00

We've been working on a lot of stuff that happens behind the scenes on gruburge (viz., the mother function that calculates predictions and gets result sets) so most of the time it doesn't look like much is happening. But we've just made a couple of improvements that you should find useful.

First, we added a page to browse all the tags, which is in tag cloud format (tags with more restaurants appear in bigger text than those with fewer). Also, more tags are coming soon, so don't worry about that.

Second, we've been improving the search box. It start out as a simple full text search of restaurant names, but now we're doing some spell checking and also searching restaurant descriptions, reviews, and tags. The blurbs that appear with search results tell you where how your search matched each result. We've got a lot more planned for that little search box, so keep an eye on it.

Finally, we also made the add restaurant process a little bit smoother. There's no longer a direct link to add a new restaurant; rather, whenever you do a search, you'll have an option of adding a new restaurant if you didn't find what you were looking for. We think this is more intuitive, since the only time you'll need to add a restaurant is when you realize it's not already on gruburge.

Keep playing with the site and sending us your feedback.

--team gruburge (woot woot)

New Browse Page

2006-02-13T13:01:00.000-05:00

We just added a browse page at http://gruburge.com/browse . This is a great way to check out popular tags, find out what restaurants are new on gruburge, and check out restaurants that have been recently related. We're going to add some more features to this page soon, so check back for updates.

Omicron Release

2006-02-10T13:47:00.000-05:00

The gruburge omicron release is underway. We've asked a few close friends to signup, and they're adding, rating, and reviewing restaurants to help poplulate the database. They're giving lots of great feedback (our todo list has over 100 items for this weekend), and the site will be changing frequently to take into account the suggestions and bugs reported.

Thanks for the help . We're gonna have this thing solid enough to invite some more users very soon.

The Grub Blog is Alive

2006-02-07T23:03:00.000-05:00

Here's where we'll post gruburge updates.