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Introducing Speedvisit – a quick and easy way to record visits from people

Here is a demo web application / SaaS called SpeedVisit that individuals and companies can use to easily and quickly record visits from people to record basic customer demographic information.

Features include:

  • Groups – create a group so you add other users, locations and referrers to it.
  • Users – add additional users to your group as you want.
  • Locations – add locations where visits will take place.
  • Referrers – add referrers to record how visitor was referred.

The definition of ‘visit’ is pretty broad. It could be customers, co-workers, classmates, attendees in many situations including:

  • Retail Stores
  • Staff Meetings
  • Convenience Stores
  • Restaurants
  • Street Vendors
  • Art Studios
  • Non-Profits
  • Community Clubs
  • Sports Events
  • Social Events
  • Trade Shows

The demographic information that you can record currently includes:

  • Gender
  • Age
  • Zipcode or postal code
  • Income
  • Prev Visit
  • Referrer
  • Location
  • Purchase
  • Email
  • Comments

The site is mobile friendly responsive design so it works on phones, tablets, laptops and desktops.

The data is totally portable with easy export of all visits to csv file. It is setup with SSL so your data will be securely transferred between your browser and the server.

This is a screenshot of the top of the visit capture page which is the central feature of the application and workflow.  Simply use radio buttons and choosers to select categorize the visitor and add record. The page will then be ready for the next visitor.

speedvisit1

 

The data is available for anyone else to view it, to view aggregated statistics, etc. This is screenshot of the recorded visit data.

speedvisit2

You can sign into the demo account to see what sample account and visits look like too.

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Single CakePHP application & MySQL database to serve multiple domains

I have a bunch of websites that have the same structure and content that vary only by the category for each site. So content for all sites can reside in a single database schema and filtered to specific categories for each site.

In order to do this I created a custom CakePHP application with one MySQL database to serve multiple public facing websites each with their own unique domain.

In order to make this work you need a hosting account that will allow you to map website serving directories to domain names. Different hosting providers may have different methods of doing this.

The secret to make this work is to have the application parse the domain name that is calling the application and then use that to filter the database records for that domain category.

In CakePHP do this by creating a function in the AppController that will check to see what domain the visitor is browsing to and then to retrieve that domain’s specific values from the special table to filter the CakePHP application. You will need to to call this function in the AppController beforeFilter function. I have included an example function named ‘fetchSettings’ below.

It will also be very helpful to make a table that contains meta data for each domain such as keywords, analytics tracking code, etc. I didn’t do include a different CSS file for each domain but you could include CSS file variable to refer to separate CSS file for each domain.

 

Check Github repository for more information:

https://github.com/sitrucp/single_cakephp_mysql_multiple_domain_app

<?php

App::uses('Controller', 'Controller');

class AppController extends Controller {
    
    public function beforeFilter() {
        $this-> getDomainSettings(); 	
    }
    
    //function which reads settings from domain table  
    function getDomainSettings(){
        //get current domain from server name as variable
        $domain = preg_replace('/^www\./', '', $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']);
        //Load domain model data
        $this->loadModel('Domain');
        //retrieve only current domain table record
        $domain_settings = $this->Domain->find('all', array('conditions' => 
        array('Domain.domain' => $domain)));  
        foreach($domain_settings as $value){
            //create Configure::Write variables from domain record to use elsewhere in application
            Configure::write('domain', $value['Domain']['domain']);
            Configure::write('domain_id', $value['Domain']['id']);
            Configure::write('ga_code', $value['Domain']['ga_code']);
            Configure::write('meta_title', $value['Domain']['meta_title']);
            Configure::write('meta_keywords', $value['Domain']['meta_keywords']);
            Configure::write('meta_description', $value['Domain']['meta_description']); 
            
            //etc retrieve as many domain specific values as required from database
        }
    }
}

?>
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Introducing Cardivvy – a website showing Car2Go real time car locations, parking and service areas

Car2Go provides developer access to their real-time vehicle location and parking availability, and service area boundaries for all of their city locations around the world.

I was using the Car2Go API to power a website created for my own use after struggling with the official Car2Go map on their site when using my mobile phone. I wanted a way to find cars by street locations.

The site includes link to get vehicle location, parking lot location and service area boundaries on a Google Map. You can click into each city, view available cars alphabetically by street location or parking lot location, and then click through to car current location on a Google Map. Each city’s Car2Go service area can be viewed on a Google Map.

I am waiting for ZipCar to get their API up and running which should be available Fall 2015, then I will integrate that into the cardivvy site too so I can see where both cars are available.

This is example of Car2Go service area boundary for Vancouver area.

car2gomap