Archive for the ‘Developments’ Category
Curious?
Posted by AI Dating | Filed under Developments, General, Web Development
For the last months I have been working on a dating site that uses fuzzy inferencing. In order to test new functionality I like to obtain some more user data.
Therefore I’d like to kindly ask anyone to sign up, even if you are not single, and answer the questions that are asked to you by the dating assistant.
The menu on the left is not active yet and you will not be able to use more than one photo.
If you are in a relationship or you want to withdraw your data later this year, please let me know. I would also encourage you that if you have a partner that he/she can also try the system. It would be nice to see whether you will be matched to your partner or not (matches are not yet visible to the user). Also I like to know any feedback you have, especially concerning the functionality or user experience. The project is almost finished and I am working on documenting the work. After the write up I hope i can use the feedback to improve the web site and to add more functonality.
The sign up page can be found at: http://www.aidating.co.uk/signup/
If you want to log on at a later stage you can do so at: http://www.aidating.co.uk/login/
Note that most effort is gone into the GUI and the matching algorithm and that contacting other users was not the primary concern during the period of the project itself. You can obviously expect this functionality soon since it is necessary part of every dating site. Also not that it is just a prototype and I therefore do not claim any specific results yet. You can leave any feedback regarding the site in this thread.
Ajax GUI
Posted by AI Dating | Filed under Developments, Web Development
Currently I am working on the AJAX GUI in which I use EXT JS. EXT JS is an AJAX framework like those of Google, Dojo, Mochikit, Spry. EXT is based on Yahoo’s YUI framework. The use of AJAX enables me to do asynchronous updates in the graphical user interface (like updating questions from the AI matching agent) and it makes it more easy to build rich user interfaces. On the other hand you have to make extensive use of Javascript, which is harder than conventional web development and it takes more effort to protect all possible asynchronous requests from unauthorised use.
Templating and friendly urls
Posted by AI Dating | Filed under Developments, Web Development
Today I installed the Smarty template engine in order to keep the programming logic and presentation logic seperate. I embedded smarty in a mechanism for url rewriting so the page requests are queried to the database and then processed by smarty so that every request can be shown in whichever template.
Security
Posted by AI Dating | Filed under Developments, Web Development
Since a dating site deals with extensive user data, security might be an issue. Although from the ethics perspective people will agree on the fact that the supplied information becomes property of the application and/or organizations around it. Just like on MySpace and other social profile equivalents. However the data gathered should also be stored in a secure way so that other users can’t access it when they don’t have permission to get it.
So I looked into authorisation systems. Some scripts are now secured using the apache authorisation module (.htpasswd). However for the user pages I needed an authorisation script that is secure and provides people with a login and sessions so they can stay logged in for some time. Many scripts were available but I decided to go with the Auth extension of Pear. For which an installation of Pear is also a prerequisite. So today I installed PEAR and I am experimenting with the offered authorisation options and how to implement those. Good authentication is a necessity especially since AJAX requests are quite vulnerable to misuse. Tomorrow I will look into how to store the user data. PEAR is also used for the database abstraction layer and might be used for other functionality that will be implemented.
Creating a secure PHP login script
Creating a secure PHP Login Script
Pear
Domain Hunting
Posted by AI Dating | Filed under Developments, Web Development
For the past months I have been thinking about how to represent a dating site. How should the user experience be. One part of it is the GUI and another aspect is the name. What is in a name? Well a lot I guess! Almost every name related to dating (including stupid names incorporating numbers, mistypings, etc) have been taken, either by dating sites or domain hunters.
So it was very hard to come up with a name. The name should be original, easy to remember and it should somewhat cover what the web site is about. So many things came to mind and were usually taken. So for the moment I have the names “AI Dating” which covers what it is about but it is a bit tech savvy and I’ve got the name “Dating Atmosphere” which is not too bad but it is quite long for a domain name. Dating Atmosphere was actually derived from datingsphere, but that was taken as usually. With the sphere in the name I wanted to represent the idea in the web application that you might be in the middle and potential dates are in spheres around you based on functional proximity (match percentage). Possibly this will be shown in such a way in the GUI if there is time to develop it that way. This is one of the aspects that is novel and not seen on other dating sites (afaik).
So for the moment the dating site can be found at: aidating.nl (for a Dutch audience), aidating.co.uk (for the UK audience) and datingatmosphere.com (possibly for an international audience).
If you have any suggestions for a nice name that has not been taken, please let me know ;-).