I have been working tirelessly on compiling points of interest for TravelingNetwork.com.
I currently have over 300,000 restaurants that have been added to the Traveling Network staging database. Once I verify the integrity, the data will be pushed to production.
I expect my electricity bill will be astronomical because I have two servers running 24/7 processing and inserting the data into my staging database. My air conditioner has been running non stop. It doesn’t help that I live near Miami either.
I am well on my way of accomplishing the goal of posting over 1,000,000 resources to the database by the end of 2009.
My next hurdle will be allowing these resources to be available to all of my visitors without any negative affect on the performance of the website. How does one make 1,000,000 resources able to be searched by any string and report back accurate results in milliseconds? This problem becomes exponential. Imagine if I had 20,000,000 points of interest.
I have also just posted a link to some traveling websites that I use frequently. It was important not only for me to make these public for you, but for me personally as well. Before I had to visit Delicious to access all of my bookmarks. Since I am on my website 24/7, I figured it would be beneficial to my visitors and myself to post the links here.
I have also continued work on my popularity index. This is essentially a large ranking system that takes everything, and I mean everything, into consideration. I have extensive experience in the past with visitor rating systems and I am utilizing everything I have learned from that into Traveling Network. When you search for hotels in new york, or restaurants in grand rapids, the order in which the listings show up will be due to this popularity index.
The beauty of this index is as the site grows, the index becomes more accurate. With spam protection and rating coefficient adjustments, the index will maintain its integrity and become a reliable source for decision making. The true beauty is in the automatic nature of the index. But I won’t get into that here!
Oh and did I mention I will be posting tens of thousands of Golf Courses by the end of next month? I love to golf.
-Mr. Travel