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Ask HN: How should I start on a social campus food website?

2 points by DaemonXI ↗ HN
I want to start working on an idea I've had for a while now. It's a social food website like Urbanspoon, but based around a university setting - focusing more on walking distance and specific location, and including ratings for, say, dining halls on campus.

I don't know where to begin with this. I have a list of features and ideas laid out, am working on designing the basic site layout on paper, and have no idea which programming language to start with.

Should I use PHP and MySQL since they're so prevalent? What about Ruby? Another one that strikes me is Python, but it doesn't seem to be much of a web language.

5 comments

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chrismiller
Use whatever language you are most familiar with.

If you have all the features laid out you should start building a prototype of the service. Seeing the basic features start to come together is great inspiration to keep building and improving the site.

pilom
Be sure to check out the competitors in this field. I'm confused how this would be different than Yelp or urbanspoon which offer "things within X miles." Also check out campusfood.com. They offer a similar service and allow you to order online.
DaemonXI
The big things I want this to do that Urbanspoon doesn't would be to rate dining halls in addition to restaurants and to find very specific walking distances from certain residence halls on campus. I am kind of basing my idea on Urbanspoon, but with more of an individual college focus.

I'll take a look at campusfood, thanks!

cjj121
Check out localupsolutions.com - they might be able to help as they have a white-label restaurant guide solution.
papa
Re: language choice, pick the one you're most comfortable working with (if you don't know, just start playing around with each). Cake, Rails and Django are all web frameworks for PHP, Ruby and Python respectively and may be appropriate for what you need.

As for the project, you've already done some of the right first steps with the feature list and paper mockups. Building it comes next.

Pick a couple of features to build out and maybe select a single university/town to focus on initially and build out functionality and content for that first.