Skip to content
Jan 23 2011 / Aaron

Coding Blitz

I’ve been getting more time lately to muck around with personal projects. One of those is ‘finishing’ my web version of CRON-o-Meter.  Last week I finally got the food editor working. Now all that is left to bring it close to parity with the stand-alone version is the recipe system & editor.

I recently threw up a build onto Amazon’s new Elastic Beanstalk service to test it out. It worked quite fantastically well. The pricing for the MySQL instance is a little on the high side though (It looks like it would run close to $80/month just to sit there idle). It would still be a lot cheaper to rent a dedicated cloud server. But the simplicity of the Amazon solution is how it took virtually no configuration to get it all running and hosted. I’m impressed.

Today I got Facebook’s OAuth working, which means you can now log in using your facebook account, as an option. Surprisingly, their documentation was shit. It looked nice but it was repeatedly subtly wrong, and only intensive googling forums found the nips & tucks required to make it go.

Once the basics are all up and running, I’ll get a small private beta going. Longer term, I’ll have to see if it can be supported with ads, subscription fees, or a mix of both. That is, assuming there’s any sufficient interest in it. The market for web based diet sites is pretty crowded, so I’m pretty skeptical it can carve out much more than a small niche.

5 Comments

leave a comment
  1. bill / Jan 24 2011

    I am interested. Nice to hear about your progress.

  2. John / Jan 29 2011

    I just wanted to send you a quick thank you for CRON-o-Meter as I realized that I have been using it for over 2.5 years to help me stay [reasonably] on track with my own CRON progress.

    Thanks you very much!

  3. Jon / Feb 8 2011

    Do you think the web version will work on an iOS device? There are a few decent trackers, but none as comprehensive in the tracking as cronometer.

    • Aaron / Feb 17 2011

      My web prototype does work in the iPhone browser — but it’s not formatted for the screen size properly, and doesn’t avail of the special iPhone controls for data entry. So it works, but it’s not very fun to use in the current form.

  4. Chris / Feb 9 2011

    I have to agree that there doesn’t seem to be another diet tracking app as comprehensive as CRON-o-Meter is. I’m very much looking forward to the web based version and would gladly pay to help support something as useful as CRON-o-Meter.

Leave a Comment