Spitgamer has been "live" for a couple of weeks now. As far as I know, the only link to the website is in the CakePHP Google group. I am a developer and am not so great in the marketing department. If you have ideas on how to spread the word about Spitgamer, feel free to leave a comment (registered users can now comment on blog posts) or shoot me an email ( kung foo fool at g mail ).

The Amazon lookup feature has been performing quite nicely for a while now, so I think Spitgamer is finally ready for some testing. I added Spitgamer to a list of CakePHP web sites, but otherwise the word still isn't out. If you have friends that enjoy video games, make sure to tell them about Spitgamer! The more people that use the website, the more people we can trade games with.

So the site has been having some problems. Fortunately at this point, I haven't "put the word out" on the site itself so it's not really affecting anyone.

The problem is the limitations that Dreamhost has put on me, and me attempting to get around those to conform to the terms of service that are included in the Amazon e-Commerce setup.

What I'm doing is retrieving information from the Amazon website when you add a game to your list. This allows you to use the UPC code to lookup information, and will also allow you to create a "wishlist" that attempts to find matches in the system based on the UPC code.

The Amazon TOS requires that you limit lookups to once per second. For now, that's easy to do, but I needed to create some sort of "queue" to line up jobs and space them out to once per second in the event multiple jobs are submitted at once. Originally I was launching the queue via a background task (e.g., "php monitor.php&"). Sadly, Dreamhost believes this would encourage server abuse so they disallow it. So I had to come up with another method. Persistent background processes are, of course, a no-no. I suppose my only option is pay for a dedicated server or come up with a workaround.

Right now I'm setting it up so that when submit the form it gives you some sort of notice that it's retrieving information and then does it in the background via AJAX (it still works with no javascript, but it just wouldn't be quite as user-friendly). I have it working locally, but for some reason, I'm still having problems with making it work on Dreamhost (part of the problem is that Dreamhost runs PHP5 in a CGI environment instead of an Apache module).

I'm still working on it, but my time has been limited due to work and personal obligations.

You can now add users to your "network" and keep up with the games that they add. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed to keep up to date with your friends.

The blog now has an RSS feed as well.

I read an excellent article that sort of encapsulated the philosophy put into Spitgamer: Just Build It, Darn It!. I like to think that the site is actually pretty flexible, but I'm sure as traffic grows (as it hopefully will!) I will have to tweak things a bit.

As you can see, I've changed a few things (most minor cosmetic changes). I'm sure more will change later, but I'm hoping the logo will stick for now.

Some things that I'm working on now and hope to see put up soon:

• A user "network" - mark other users as friends and track games they've added.
• The ability to have a "wishlist" of games and automatically be notified when one of those games are added.

I'm very limited in the time that I can devote to this project, but things are slowly coming along!