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Category: ROR

Tastymate adds an extra ingredient to restaurant reviews

Whether it’s true or not, folks in Portland like to claim that we’ve got more restaurants and bars per capita than any city in the United States. And that has a lot of folks thinking about the ranking and reviewing of those restaurants and bars.

I mean, we have a ton of restaurants. But they’re not all good.

Enter tastymate, a new restaurant review tool, which has quietly launched a BETA of its service.

A Ruby-on-Rails side-project for Graeme Nelson, tastymate was designed to be simple, straightforward, and quick, with a simple premise:

I created tastymate because I wanted a better way to find and share tasty restaurants and bars. I wanted to be able to find tasty spots through my friends and their friends.

“Voting” is based on how many people have added the restaurant or bar to their personal lists of “tasty spots.”

So, it’s another restaurant-review site, you say. What’s the extra ingredient?

The little extra ingredient that makes tastymate interesting—besides its inherent simplicity—is tastymate’s Twitter integration.

Follow tastymate on Twitter and you’ll receive notifications when new folks join or when restaurants are added.

If you have Twitter on all-day, it provides a pretty compelling way to answer the “where should I go to eat?” question when you have recommendations flowing in via your Twitter stream. Especially as the user base continues to grow.

For more information or to register for an account, visit tastymate.

Planet Argon offers up Boxcar account for October Hackfest

To support the monthly Rails Hackfest, Portland-based Planet Argon has offered a six-month Boxcar account to 1st place winner for October.

Boxcar is a pre-configured virtual server for hosting your business-level Rails applications and was designed to support the best-practices for Rails deployment.

The Rail Hackfest was designed to further the development of Ruby on Rails source code through good-natured competition. Contributions are rated and charted throughout the month, with the top contributors walking away with prizes.

For more information on Boxcar, see the Boxcar site. For more information on the Rails Hackfest, visit the Working with Rails site.

Making PHP act like Rails

The Portland PHP users group, pdxphp, has scheduled its next meeting for September 11 at CubeSpace. The topic? Implementing Rails concepts with PHP.

The meeting begins at 6:30.

The Portland PHP Users Group is a community forum for people to share, meet and learn about PHP and Open Source technologies. The group strives to be a valuable resource for anyone interested in PHP regardless of their skill level or background. Through sharing and communication we believe we can foster a creative and successful community of PHP developers.

For more information, stay tuned to the pdxphp site.