Last Tuesday as the deadline for NYCBIGApps competition was coming close I managed to finish and submit my entry, foodinspectr.com. It’s a really simple app that takes the NYC Restaurant Health Inspection dataset and makes it accessible as an iPhone optimized webpage. My end goal was to add a button that would access an iPhones Lat and Long via JavaScript and return the restaurant if the user is there.

Alas, I got an email today saying that we cannot make changes to our apps until the decisions are made so I will leave that be for now.

The app was built on a Linode box running Ubuntu 8.04, Nginx proxy’s the requests to a Mongrel’s server but I think I’ll be switching over to Passenger when I figure that out. The app uses the Tank-Engine plugin and not much else.

All in all, it was a great first project for exploring Ruby and learning how to deploy a Rails app.