Hi! Welcome to greenlemon…

Before I begin with this post – I must warn you: The story is long. Trainerlisting consumed almost 8-12 months of my life. There were many failures and not very many successes – but full of lessons, and yes, I would do it all over again.

Elevator Pitch

Trainerlisting is a simple to use, self service, Australian Personal Trainer directory. The Personal Trainer profiles on Trainerlisting are filled with standard profile features: photos, videos, comments, ratings, etc.

Concept

The initial concept for Trainerlisting was born while I was running on a treadmill at my local gym. I noticed a pin-board of A4 printed PT profiles – and many gym goers huddling around trying to learn more about their potential PT. My thought pattern went something like – “Why would you huddle around, cramped, and squinting, trying to find out about a PT, when you could just go and check out the website, right?”

Wrong. The gym website didn’t contain any PT profiles! Why? There’s one reason I can think of immediately – PTs come and go. If you didn’t build your website with a CMS solution in place, you’d have to pay a developer every time you wanted to make changes to the PT profile pages.

It seemed like a great opportunity – build a site that would:

1. Give gym owners/managers/PT managers an easy way of adding/modifying/deleting  PT information from their website.

2. Modify this information in one place only and have it immediately push out to all connected sites.

3. If they have that information on their website, pull it into a directory and give the business another marketing outlet.

The idea seemed plausible, in fact, it still does. So what happened?

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Elevator Pitch

delizzy.com is a delicious.com bookmarks search engine. The app searches through the content, not just the titles, of your delicious bookmarks.

Concept

I came up with the idea for this app while using delicious –  the social bookmarking site. This app is a kind of”scratch my own itch” app – meaning it solved an issue I had/have. I’m a lazy saver of bookmarks, meaning that when I save a bookmark I’m not thorough – I’m quick. I don’t add tags, a description, etc which ultimately leads to information-poor bookmarks. This makes searching over my bookmarks very hard.

Search engines are information rich – they store loads of information about websites, index it and open the index up for search. Why not combine the power of search engines with your bookmarks – that way you can have powerful, lazy bookmarking…

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Elevator Pitch

Listaurus is a collection of Top X themed lists.

Concept

Searching the web for the keywords “minimalist site design” yields Top X lists for the first 5 results… I wanted to aggregate these lists in the one place and present them for easy consumption.

I didn’t want to spend too much time on building a site – since I was working on something else at the time – but I did want to save these lists somewhere. Why not bookmarks? Possible – in fact, I built a site for searching over the content of your bookmarks. I didn’t go the bookmark route as I wanted to include content that wasn’t necessarily my taste.

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Elevator Pitch

suburb/slice showcases 2006 census data in a visually consumable format – via charts, images and maps.

Concept

suburb/slice was developed for the App My State competition in 2010 – which was a Victorian Government initiative to give innovation in the Victorian state a kickstart. It was the first build for the competition – and my first app in PHP.

As part of the competition, the Victorian Government released, or made available, several datasets – including links to existing data  websites.

I came up with the idea while searching through these datasets and spotting a very badly organised Victorian Government Census site. I guess my initial thought was – if I’m finding navigating this site very difficult, the normal user would find it almost impossible…

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Elevator Pitch

Watergeddon is an in your face, albeit – impossible, representation of a water storage doomsday countdown.

Concept

Watergeddon was the 2nd app built for the App My State competition and was designed to shock but educate. It’s a submission to the sustainability category – a category I thought would have the least competition and therefore the highest likelihood of a favorable outcome.

It’s a big, in your face counter, one which you have the ability to influence – interactive and fun with a dash of seriousness. A bit like me…

The app also contains a per postcode representation of water usage, because I love visualizing data. A graph showcasing common water usage in the home – did you know that a full load of washing uses up 140 litres of water? And finally, links to several water saving government web resources.

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Elevator Pitch

censusheat is a simple, visual and informative app that showcases census data for postcode regions/polygons.

Concept

This app was my third entry in the the App My State competition in 2010 – which was a Victorian Government initiative to give innovation in the Victorian state a kickstart.

I wanted to create an app that was purely map based – since I wanted to explore the Google Maps API in depth. All Google APIs are very powerful yet I rarely see many innovative and complex uses.

HTML + Javascript were the obvious technologies for such as simple app. IMHO, these were the only choices – fast loading, cross browser and lean.

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vicholiday was the final submission to the App My State competition. The app queries the Victorian Tourism API for 4 essential holiday making services – accommodation, stuff to do, transportation and tours.

Elevator Pitch

The one stop shop for researching a Victorian holiday destination – get ideas on accommodation, activities, transport to and from and available tours. Add individual items to a short list, print the list out and have a reference when booking.

Concept

The light bulb moment for this app occurred when I was inspecting the many sites utilizing the Victorian Tourism API. They all seemed to use the API as an additional feature to their site/app – not as the main feature. I wanted to create an app that was entirely based on the API (a very bad idea which we will discuss further on).

I also wanted to see how much red tape I would have to go through in order to gain access to the API. In fact, the process wasn’t too bad – an application email, a response with 50 pages of documentation that had to be read, a phone interview, followed by an acceptance email and appropriate credentials.

I then figured that not many others would be using this API – possibly giving me a better chance of winning the overall competition.

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