Dan Olsen’s Weblog

I know it has been a while since I have written anything on my blog and I always promise myself that I will get better. Well, here is one sorry attempt at getting better.

When I started work for the State of Utah my first project was called the Employee Gateway. It was a web application that was a central point for finding all HR information an employee might need. Well, a few months ago the HR people came back to DTS and said that the governor would like a section added to the Employee Gateway for the new energy initiative they were kicking off. Part of that project was to allow for a virtual suggestion box where employees could enter suggestions about energy conservation ideas and then vote those suggestions up and down.

Well, one of the requirements for the virtual suggestion box was that they wanted to show data from the suggestion box in the actual web site. After looking at options that were already out there they determined that to get a suggestion box with an API it would cost quite a bit a month. After thinking about the idea I realized that I could create an application like that pretty easily. That’s when SuggestIt was born.

SuggestIt has been live for almost a month now and has been evolving. I am still looking for suggestions on how to improve the application so please go and beat on it for a while. Currently the service is free but I have covered myself by including a line that in the future I may be implementing a pricing structure. As most developers know, there are costs to hosting a site. Currently my income for the site is off Google Ads which does not come close to covering costs that I will accrue over time.

SuggestIt is written in Python (one of my favorite languages thanks to Phil Windley). It is hosted on Google Appengine and so far the cost of running the site is free. However as traffic increases (I hope) I will exceed the free quotas. Hence the reason I am planning on working out some sort of pricing for the service. Any suggestions on pricing structures would be greatly appreciated. Any publicity would be greatly appreciated as well.

I downloaded Google Chrome as soon as I could. I’m always interested in trying out new Google products. They have always done a good job in my opinion. I use GMail, Google Apps, Google Reader, Picasa, etc. I’m a big Google fan.

I have liked Google Chrome so much that it is my default browser. Does it have everything I would like? No, not quite but it is showing promise.

One of the things I was surprised about was the fact that the browser wasn’t hooked into Google Bookmarks. I love the Google Toolbar and the Bookmark feature. I figured that this may be an addition later until I read on a user forum about the idea of integrating Google Bookmarks into the browser. Google is probably trying to avoid integrating their other products into the browser to avoid those anti-trust guys.

I am sure that there will be some sort of Google Toolbar for Google Chrome but it will be a plugin that you have to download. At the moment Chrome doesn’t support plugins but from the press release we know that those will be coming. I would love FireBug to be ported to Google Chrome. To develop my code I still use Firefox so I have FireBug support. The developer tools that are integrated into the browser are good but not as good as FireBug. However, they are much better then IE’s developer tools.

If you haven’t tried Google Chrome yet, I would recommend it. I love it!