Des Moines Alive
- AJAX
- CSS
- Facebook API
- Foursquare API
- Google Maps API
- HTML
- Image Processing
- JavaScript
- jQuery
- JSON
- MySQL
- PHP
- Simple Geo API
- Twitter API
Des Moines Alive is a personal project that my friend Nick Leeper and I built to help Des Moines Area folks find awesome local bars and restaurants. In addition to general merchant info, we provided users with aggregated data such as reviews, foursquare tips, merchant tweets, etc.
We designed Des Moines Alive to be very lite and easy to navigate. The goal was to provide our visitors with the information they wanted as quickly as possible.
v2 - latest version
Nick and I decided to use this version of Des Moines Alive to learn new things, play with APIs, and switch our focus to local businesses. We built our own custom PHP MVC, with ideas borrowed from our experiences with Rails and Kohana. We redesigned our database to be more efficient. We also began using many more APIs such as SimpleGeo, Google Maps, Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter to aggregate data and give our users more information.
1 previous version
v1 April 2005
Des Moines Alive is a personal project that Nick Leeper and I developed to help Des Moines Area people find new and cool places to go. We focused primarily on restaurants and bars but also gave information about local sports and recreation. The main feature was to allow visitors to review any of the locations listed.
We designed Des Moines Alive to be very lite and easy to navigate. The goal was to provide our visitors with the information they need as quickly as possible.
At a year old the site was getting thousands of hits daily and had hundreds of reviews submitted. Des Moines Alive was also featured in local print media.