Algorithm Blogs

I’ve been waiting for this blog post for more than a year now.
This is my startup, Plnnr.com. If you want, go there first, form an opinion, and then get back here, I’ll wait :)
As you can tell, plnnr.com is an automatic trip planner – it saves you a lot of the trouble and hard work of planning a trip, and leaves you to decide just on the interesting things – what you plan to do on your trip.

I’ve been working on this with my partner, a product manager, for about 15 months now. We opened up the website for public access on July 18. Since then we showed it to people to get feedback but we didn’t publicize it.
Now, we’re starting to publicize it “for real”, with the goal of getting people to really use it.

We’ve been working on this project with no funding all this time, as our part time job, and as a result – there’s still a lot of work to be done. We have a lot of amazing features planned, and we have a great vision ahead of us, and we hope that we can achieve it.

This is the point where you come in – tell us what you think – here, or on our blog, and soon on the feedback system. We need your help!
Of course, if you find it in your heart to tell your friends who are planning a trip about our website, please do :)

There’s a lot more to be said about this project, and I intend to say it in future blog posts, so stay tuned!

My partner and I started to work on a website a few months ago. We have a working prototype, and we are always improving it. My work is mostly concentrated on a smart Python backend, and on a Javascript front-end, while a thin controller acts as a messenger between the two.
Lately, I’ve worked on improving the UI. As expected, I rely heavily on CSS. I generate a lot of html elements using Mochikit and format them with CSS classes. While obviously better than the old alternatives, I still don’t like CSS. Maybe it’s because I don’t understand it deeply enough, but for me, there is still a lot of voodoo involved. An example I found, which luckily I didn’t run into yet, is collapsing margins.

Still, even with all its voodoo, CSS is bearable. At least until you get to IE. My latest run in with it was a scrolling bug, and I ran into many other issues. However, as much as I complain, I’m probably getting it easy, as when we started work, we decided not to support IE 6, at least until required.
Our reasoning was:

• Developing for IE6 both independently and consistently with other browsers has a high cost attached to it.
• IE6’s use rates are declining, and will decline even more by the time we launch (See these statistics for example).
• Our first versions were mostly required as a prototype to prove our technology to potential investors.
• As a two-men team, and a one man programming team, we are very low on development resources.

Given my latest bout of UI programming, this choice made me just a little bit happier.