A few days ago I was finally ready to go live with one of the projects that have taken up my time since leaving Kapow – a price comparison search engine for web hosting called WebHostNinja.com. The site is all written using CodeIgniter and thanks to Kemie at monolinea.com it also looks great. What I am trying to do is a usefull site where you can compare different hosting providers and their plans so that you can find exactly what you need as cheaply as possible. There are already quite a few such sites out there, but they are all static, hard to use, ugly as hell and more focused on selling hostig than on providing a good service for the user. I think and hope that there is a market for WebHostNinja.com as well, if nothing else there is a chance of doing some cool images of ninjas.
There are still some bugs to work out, I want to add a lot more web hosting providers to the index and of course there are also loads of features I want to add. In my database I do have quite a lot of information about each hosting provider and their plans, so it would be cool to mash that up with some other data, but at this point in time my mind is blank what to do. If you have any ideas about this please let me know!
Another project that I am involved with is the Mexican TV-listing site enlatele.com.mx (“en la tele” = “on TV” in spanish). We have just finished an iteration in our continous development, and vastly improved the search and added other nifty things like channel logos and filtering channels based on your cable provider. I have several entires about writing widgets/gadgets for enlatele.com.mx for sites like MySpace etc, so that will give me a good excuse to soon dig deeper into the OpenSocial specs.
I have more things up my sleeve, projects that have much more to do with mashups. As soon as there is something I can tell you about I will, so watch this space.
It´s awesome to see what´s possible with PHP and CodeIgniter. I am a newbie to PHP and programming, but this make me want to learn CodeIgniter!
I have question: Did you use PHP only, or did you also used Kapow products to do the mashup and then store it with MySQL when you made your Ninja website?
– I have tried Openkapow on my website, but it seems very unstable. I have looked at Kapow OnDemand, but I am sure it will cost more than I afford on my little project at nonews.no.
— Duc Nguyen
For WebHostNinja I used only PHP and CodeIgniter, enlatele is acctually built in PHP using the Zend framework (I didnt do the acctual coding there). Neither WebHostNinja or EnLaTele are using any Kapow products (yet at least).
I am sorry to hear that Openkapow is unstable, I was under the impression that it was much better know. Since I have at least one project in the pipeline that would depend heavily on Openkapow this could be a problem for me as well. Have you addressed that problem on the Openkapow forums?
When I started to use Openkapow to create some RSS feeds to use on my page, I was also under the impression that the Openkapow´s server was stable. But during a period of 2-3 months I´ve experienced down time on this server.
You can read about those problems on this link to the forum: http://openkapow.com/forums/thread/19577.aspx
Lately I have not experienced down time. I really hope this continues, as I appreciate RoboMaker a lot! I´ve not tested a better RSS maker than Openkapow´s Robomaker (I´ve tested some Yahoo Pipes and Dapper.net).