Sorry I haven't made a blog entry for the past several days, but I've been immersed in my latest web dev project. It's far from ready for prime time, but I think it's far enough along that I can at least debut it with a huge asterisk that says "BETA" on it.
(Hey, Microsoft and Google do it all the time-- so why not? LOL)
Several weeks ago, I was listening to the GQ Magazine podcast, and the topic of discussion was "All you need to know about wine." This rekindled in me the interest to try learning more about wine again. After some trial and error, I discovered that I seem to like red wines better than white wines, and my favorite red at this moment is the Cabernet Sauvignon.
Of course, you aren't supposed to have wine all by itself-- if you want to really enjoy it, you need to pair it with a complimentary food. I have some acquaintances who are fantastic at this, but I have no sense for this sort of pairing. Fortunately, there are reference guides and books for people like me, but who wants to walk into their favorite restaurant with a copy of "Wine for Total Friggin' Morons" tucked under their arm? Nothing says "NOOB!" like a black and yellow book.
Having a condensed version of a food pairing guide on your cell phone, on the other hand . . . .
So, I created a relational database, worked out all the various tables, the foreign keys, the relationships, etc. only to realize that I'd need to host this somewhere that had mySQL and PHP or Perl! Well, don't get me wrong-- this is an entertaining diversion, but spending $8 or $10 a month just so I can have my own personal wine/food pairing reference seemed pennywise and pound foolish.
So, there I sat with my glass of Cabernet Sauvignon, stymied. Perhaps it was a flash of genius, or perhaps I was just a little drunk (???), but that's when it occurred to me that you could use Blogspot's search capability, its tags, etc. as a form of application platform. You'd need to cut the template down tremendously to get it to display on older cell phones properly. At this point, it had become more of a novelty and challenge than a practical solution-- so I started entering each wine as an individual post, and labeled them with matching food pairs.
I still need to cut the template code down quite a bit, but it seems to function on my old Nokia 3100 with a few glitches here and there.
And that is how Wine411 came to be. Enjoy!