Gingerbread and Candy Corn (http://gingerbread-and-candy-corn.appspot.com) - A one-stop spot for finding houses with holiday decorations. Sadly, I don't think it'll be ready for Halloween :( Though it should be ready for a launch near Black Friday :)
As a kid, I always loved driving around looking at Halloween/Christmas lights and as I've gotten older and moved to a bigger city, its been a little difficult knowing where to go to see good houses. The only real way to do it right now is YouTube videos or hoping your local newspaper has it covered.
The reason I think its cool is I'm learning to use Google App Engine on a responsive HTML5 style page. Since I'm not too graphic oriented, I'm learning how to use Flat UI to my advantage (as you can see in the nowhere near done demo). I'm going to get to learn a lot of web hosting stuff, like the official webpage currently is hosted with Dreamhost, but how do I get GAE to play nice with that, managing/handling requests, how to appropriately display houses without killing my GAE free package. If it generates enough success this Christmas, I'm hoping to spend next year learning mobile development for an app that does the same thing, but also gives you directions.
Have you used your AWS free tier up yet? If not, you should consider jumping on it. Free 24/7 micro server for a year - and you host the webserver, so you can install Apache, Nginx, whatever you want. I used it for a while, and the most I got charged was a couple quarters for going over on disk usage (DB was doing unnecessary reads / writes).
Also - this is a cool idea. As I've grown up in the same area, it seems like fewer and fewer people go all out for decorations around Halloween and Christmas, it who does with minimal effort. I can't find any examples (none in my area), but does it support pictures of the decorations?
I'm going to try to, video too; right now I ask for a link, but since I missed out on this big weekend I have time til Christmas to work on it. Obviously I can't add every house myself, but I've made it really easy to add a house and remove a house, all with a buffer to avoid spammers.
I have not touch AWS before, so I'll look into it. I went GAE because I'd used Udacity's Web Development course and in it they talk about how Udacity actually runs off GAE, so I thought if they did it, its do-able.
As a kid, I always loved driving around looking at Halloween/Christmas lights and as I've gotten older and moved to a bigger city, its been a little difficult knowing where to go to see good houses. The only real way to do it right now is YouTube videos or hoping your local newspaper has it covered.
The reason I think its cool is I'm learning to use Google App Engine on a responsive HTML5 style page. Since I'm not too graphic oriented, I'm learning how to use Flat UI to my advantage (as you can see in the nowhere near done demo). I'm going to get to learn a lot of web hosting stuff, like the official webpage currently is hosted with Dreamhost, but how do I get GAE to play nice with that, managing/handling requests, how to appropriately display houses without killing my GAE free package. If it generates enough success this Christmas, I'm hoping to spend next year learning mobile development for an app that does the same thing, but also gives you directions.