what's in season?

Another programming project for those of you who are just itching for something to code. Basically, I want a website which can tell me, given my current location, what fruits and vegetables are in season right now.

Some thoughts, questions and requirements

• The site must be dead simple to and very pleasant to use. This is not something you should have to read documentation to figure out.
• This kind of thing could be easily international, so I want pictures. Maybe you can grab them from the Wikimedia Commons. I guess it would be fair to give you bonus points if you localise the thing, or maybe let me play with the language settings so I learn how to say 'rutabaga' in Arabic.
  
• How does the user tell you where s/he lives? As a default, it would be nice if you auto-detected it, but what might be nicer also is if I could play around and plug in different locations. How would you pick a location? By pointing at a map of the world? Also, maybe you don't just want a single point in the map, but a region of N kilometers around me. The question is basically, what grows N kilometers from where I live, where I get to specify
  
• Likewise, what do you do about the current date? It would also be nice if I can play around with this, asking not just 'what's in season right now' but 'what's in season during wintertime?'
• Where is all of your data coming from? How are you going to store it and look it up? What kind of data do you really need?
  
• If you want to get really really fancy, you can make the site adapt to current events. Maybe parse newspaper texts to find out that it's really not a good year for mangoes.

This is not necessarily a Haskell project (although in my silly, silly eyes, everything is potentially a Haskell project), but this might be a fun way to learn how to do web stuff and maybe play around with databases. In fact, such a project might also be useful for building a Haskell web tutorial, a kind of site that we can build together. Simple objectives that everybody can understand, and actually useful for something.

This project might also be a good way to learn about building user interfaces. Or maybe if you're not interested in working on that stuff, it would be a good opportunity to partner up with somebody else. They worry about the UI stuff and you worry about the code. I don't know anything about UI, except that I think it's important to get it right. If it helps, I greatly enjoyed Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things, as well as Bret Victor's Magic Ink.

Another programming project for those of you who are just itching for something to code. Basically, I want a website which can tell me, given my current location, what fruits and vegetables are in season right now.

Some thoughts, questions and requirements

• The site must be dead simple to and very pleasant to use. This is not something you should have to read documentation to figure out.
• This kind of thing could be easily international, so I want pictures. Maybe you can grab them from the Wikimedia Commons. I guess it would be fair to give you bonus points if you localise the thing, or maybe let me play with the language settings so I learn how to say 'rutabaga' in Arabic.
  
• How does the user tell you where s/he lives? As a default, it would be nice if you auto-detected it, but what might be nicer also is if I could play around and plug in different locations. How would you pick a location? By pointing at a map of the world? Also, maybe you don't just want a single point in the map, but a region of N kilometers around me. The question is basically, what grows N kilometers from where I live, where I get to specify
  
• Likewise, what do you do about the current date? It would also be nice if I can play around with this, asking not just 'what's in season right now' but 'what's in season during wintertime?'
• Where is all of your data coming from? How are you going to store it and look it up? What kind of data do you really need?
  
• If you want to get really really fancy, you can make the site adapt to current events. Maybe parse newspaper texts to find out that it's really not a good year for mangoes.

This is not necessarily a Haskell project (although in my silly, silly eyes, everything is potentially a Haskell project), but this might be a fun way to learn how to do web stuff and maybe play around with databases. In fact, such a project might also be useful for building a Haskell web tutorial, a kind of site that we can build together. Simple objectives that everybody can understand, and actually useful for something.

This project might also be a good way to learn about building user interfaces. Or maybe if you're not interested in working on that stuff, it would be a good opportunity to partner up with somebody else. They worry about the UI stuff and you worry about the code. I don't know anything about UI, except that I think it's important to get it right. If it helps, I greatly enjoyed Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things, as well as Bret Victor's Magic Ink.

what's in season?