The Path of Least Resistance – Phpf!
Planning the party for my 30 year birthday I have been preparing the drinks menu (UH! Shock! That’s right – I think I must have joined the Gnome Old Farts Club Band…). We have really been shopping so we have quite a selection of hard liqueurs and to help prep the menu we resorted to one of those sites where you tick off your assortment of hard liqueurs and it gives you a list of all possible drinks. Sweetness…
Well, the sweetness only goes as far as I really want another layout and I also want to scrap a lot of the drinks I find plain silly (there are in the excess of 200). What’s a geek to do?
Naturally I wrote a Python script to parse the generated page into a generic XML structure. With that in place I wrote an XSLT stylesheet for presenting the drinks XML in HTML. The next level will (ofcourse) be to feed it into a relational database and do some leet party web interface on top – So you want a drink with Tequila and Blue Bols in it? Let’s see… 
Or maybe going completely bonanza with a custom ontology for Tracker and then doing a GTK+ UI? Any better ideas?
Tags: drinks, hard liqueur, tracker, xml, xslt
July 20th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
You need a barcode scanner integrated with your web application. As people get more and more drunk they can’t push the right buttons on the web interface (no, not even if the buttons are Web 2.0-large).
And of course a Lego Mindstorm drinks-mixing-robot… But that goes without saying.