j. paul arterburn

Right now most of the daily deal sites require you to put in your email before you can even view the deals for any particular city. This is so they can send you daily reminders of what the deal of the day is; this isn’t exactly the best user experience in my eyes. It’s certainly best for the daily deal companies, I understand, as it’s putting their content in front of you without you having to do anything different from your normal daily online behavior. You’re going to check email, twitter, facebook, and a few news sites likely every time you connect. If a company can put their content in one of these mediums (or all of them) they have a higher chance of clicking with you, pun intended.

What I didn’t want to do with preVU was what I hated with the other sites and force-require an email address for this sole purpose (I would, however, like to at least provide that option in the future if a user desires the daily emails). I set out to come up with a creative solution that is both effortless but not aggressive and landed on this: gadgets - or widgets, whatever you want to call them. Starting with iGoogle & Gmail as well as the iframe solution that website owners can install on their own sites if serving a local crowd.

It’s a simple 1-click install to add the gadget to your iGoogle home page: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=ig.pre.vu/prevu.xml

It takes a few more steps to get it working in Gmail, but it’s well worth it: How to add gadgets to Gmail

This is what shows when you click on the title of the gadget (“preVU »”)

I launched a new project this week that acts as an aggregator for the plethora of daily deal sites on the Internet. If you were one of the 111 million viewers of the Super Bowl last Sunday you were exposed to two of the major players in the arena: Groupon & LivingSocial.

Visit the new site here: preVU

Part of the idea for the site is to make it easier for people to get this information without having to subscribe to a dozen different emails. But making them visit another website not normally in their daily routine (ie. email, facebook, twitter, news, rss reader, etc…) is not exactly conscious as well. So I’ve developed a widget that will allow sites such as local ISP’s/newspapers/tv stations and the like to drop on their sites and give their readership an added bonus they’re likely interested in - everything likes 50% off, right? If you find the widget useful, please request your local news site to get in touch with me and I can custom-make one to fit their requirements.

Steal this widget for your own site (change attributes as desired):

<iframe src=”http://w.pre.vu/denver” frameborder=”0” width=”300” height=”300” style=”border:2px solid #222;”></iframe>

Some of the important pieces of preVU came from the following sites:

• PHP Geo-Targeting Script: this makes it so when you simply visit http://pre.vu it will auto-direct you to the nearest city you live by. I put a little added touch to the script that Eric describes as I have an array with the latitude & longitude of each city that has it’s own preVU page; it then grabs the lat/long of the city you live in and does a distance calculation between the preVU cities & your city to determine which one to send you on to.
  
  
• Quick & Dirty PHP Caching: preVU’s code is designed to go out to each of these sites, grab the content and bring it back to you. The bottleneck in this process is the connections between my server & the daily deal servers. It’s only slightly faster than if you were to go out and load a dozen websites. It’s roughly only about 30 seconds to do this, but in today’s environment would you really stick around if it took a website 30 seconds to load? Heck no! That’s where caching comes in handy…I’ve setup a cron job to do this ‘capture process’ every 3 hours and basically save a copy of what it found in a static file. So rather than you having to take the 30 seconds to load the site every time and pull fresh content yourself, what you see is a copy of the data that’s at most 3 hours old. Because the majority of these sites don’t change content for the entire day (hence the name, *daily* deals) this process works wonders for site speed.
  
  
• I spent quite a bit of time deciding how I wanted the hovers to look when you moused-over a link. I eventually settled on qTip2 - a jquery plugin that is extremely customizable.
  
  
• Mobile Browser Detector: if you visit http://pre.vu on a mobile phone, you’ll be presented with a much more simplified version of the site. This two-line script made it a breeze for me to determine a mobile-user and give them the mobile-friendly version of the site.