Prohmote
Use Prohmote to quickly create and promote your event. Then, share your event with your friends.
Some Small Updates...
I added a couple small updates. First of all, you can now attach an image with your event. When you create an event, just select the image and attach it. The image is then shown on the actual event page at the top.
Secondly, I fixed some other minor bugs and a rather major one that wen’t unnoticed. Any descriptions that contained carriage returns were not being displayed properly and were just munging all the data together. Should look better now and this is retro so all original posts will show up OK now.
Happy Holidays
Added some nice snow effects on the Prohmote homepage.
Happy Holidays everyone!
New Project
Just an FYI, I am currently in the process of writing another application using Microsoft Azure. I will keep Prohmote running smoothly and ensure I answer all emails accordingly still. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me at support@prohmote.com or leave a suggestion via the feedback form on prohmote.com
Thanks!
Microsoft Azure Platform
Since PDC, Microsoft has released their cloud-based platform, named “Azure”. Since I am typically a Microsoft developer this is very interesting to me. The primary reason I took on Python and begun developing on Google App Engine was because there currently was no Microsoft cloud solution available.
This has now changed.
Now there is a complete platform being unveiled by Microsoft, and I am thinking about the possibility of migrating Prohmote over to Azure. A lot of the features that Microsoft will introduce with Azure are very similiar to what Google is offering with App Engine. I will update more as I research more about Azure.
Phase 2 for Prohmote
I have been working on some ideas for making Prohmote more social and interactive. Looking at the usage logs and the navigation patterns, it seems more people than not come to Prohmote, try it out and create an event then leave. Also a majority of the confirmation emails bounce back so it leads me to believe most of the things within Prohmote currently seem novelty.
Since I am confined to the current limitation of the Google App Engine, and it still being a non-released beta product — there is only so much I can push into the application. Currently there is still no roadmap to what pricing levels will be, in addition to all the other usage quotas. So it is difficult to guage how much efficiency can be integrated into Prohmote.
With that said, here are some of the ideas I have been working on for the next release of Prohmote which should go live within a couple weeks. Hopefully these features can allow users to more efficiently use Prohmote and actually do more promoting with their events. I have a brief overview of what has already been wrapped into the application as of today.
Phase 1 (Current)
- Standard event creation with typical event fields
- No login required
- Usage of jQuery API for field validation, date picking, et cetera
- Unique URL in the form of prohmote.com/6hfg8f
- Can assign an event to a category for public categories listing
- Can make an event private so it does not appear in public categories listing
- Users can confirm a reservation (yes/no) for each event, with a comment and additional guests
- RSS 2.0 feed for reservations
- Public event categories listing area
Phase 2
- Ability to provide email addresses for users you wish to promote the event to by email
- Integration with Facebook
- Print-friendly reservations page for easy on-the-fly printing
- Event and Reservation API (Create/View)
- XML and JSON support
- Additional feed support for Atom
There is more to come but this is an idea of what I have in mind for the next phase. As you can see if focuses more on the event promotion side of things rather than the creation of the event itself.
UserVoice Feedback
If you need to provide feedback on Prohmote, I have switched from using Get Satisfaction to a UserVoice widget. You will notice this on each page with a “feedback” tab on the left side. You can find the page below to submit any additional ideas, bugs or general feedback.
Updates, Memcache, more
Did some updated tonight. First of all, I cleaned up some of the Python code behind the application and some tidying. Second, begin utilizing Memcache for the data retrieval. I noticed some of the requests were using more resources that I wanted, so I want to see how well Memcache works with the Google App Engine. Also updated some references with the SiteMap and made the categories more dynamic driven by the DataStore.
Last but not least, I made the event name no longer unique. It will give you a unique identifer for the URL for example, prohmote.com/gh76o2. There really seemed no need to have the human readable URL, especially if a unique one wasn’t so long.
G’night.
Event Creation Problems
There was a problem early this morning on the creation of events. It seems a minor bug fix I made early in the morning threw everything off, causing the application to throw an exception when you attempted to create your event. It only seems to have affected a few people and the issue is now fixed.
The issue had to do with the substitution of characters that would create malformed URLs for the event name.
New User Interface, More Features
I have revamped the user interface for Prohmote, providing a more clean and appealing look. This should be a little easier on the eyes. I cleaned up some of the controls as well.
I also added event categories now. You can access these by going to http://www.prohmote.com/categories. For now the category list is simple and the descriptions need a bit of work but it’s functional. So now users can view other events created. Don’t worry, searching and filtering will be coming soon.
Other minor bug fixes were also released.
