Acro Obsession + Software Engineer = ?

[TaylorJames]

Hi, my name is Taylor and I have an Acro addiction... and I'm also a software engineer. For a while I've been trying to think of an app/website that I could build that helps us reefers with our acro obsession.

I stumbled across https://acroporaguide.com/ the other day and found it nice but the search functionality is very limited and there are lots of corals missing. Im not trying to bash whoever made the Acropora Guide website, I think it serves its purpose as a catalog, but I want more.

I am setting out to build a full catalog of SPS corals with in-depth elastic search and filtering.

The corals will be automagically scraped from various vendors as to provide links to where you can buy these corals. So when a new coral is listed on a vendors website, it will automatically be added to the catalog.

Users will also be able to sign up for notifications when a specific coral is available for sale from a specific vendor if it is out of stock.

I will also provide links to Reef2Reef conversations that revolve around the specific named coral.

Users will be able to rate and comment on vendors and corals.

Think about it like a Yelp for SPS corals and vendors but with the added functionality of a full catalog and links to where you can buy them.

If you developed https://acroporaguide.com/ maybe we can work together?

What do you think?
Should I quit now?
Any other cool ideas I could throw in there?
Not sure what I would call it, ideas?

 

[AlexWBryant]

Great idea. Would love to see this. Following

 

[jessezm]

The corals will be automagically scraped from various vendors as to provide links to where you can buy these corals. So when a new coral is listed on a vendors website, it will automatically be added to the catalog.

If automagically was a typo, do you mind if I claim that word and take credit for it? It might be the best one I've ever heard

 

[Djtonton]

I own the domain CoralDatabase.com I have been sitting on it for some time I have fiddled with the idea even created a couple sites but never ended up with anything I was really pleased with publishing.

My initial envision was users would be able to sign up for accounts and keep track of all the corals they have purchased. They can upload a picture of the coral, the name, vendor/person they got it from, date, price, URL, etc to the coral. I was thinking we could even allow the users to upload progression shots as well. So more for the users but I also wanted it to include as much information on all corals as possible and have a huge informational section.

Now piggybacking off of your idea we could have it where if a user clicks on the Golden Jawdropper it could show users and Vendors that have this coral in their tank and even better which users currently have this coral up for sale! Even if the person doesn't have the coral up for sale maybe the end user could still direct message them to see if they would be willing to frag it. take that a step further lets say I noticed TaylorJames had the Golden Jawdropper I could click on his picture and see the latest progression picture so i know how big the coral currently is (this is dependent on user updating photos of course) as well as see other corals you have for sale or in your tank that I may want. Maybe even some tank specs along with equipment could be part of the users profile.

What if you could do this:: what if I could pull up this coral database app on my phone and it would show me what corals are in the area lol. So I'm from Ohio, Lets say I was traveling for work in St.Louis. I could pull up this app in St. Louis and filter it by lets say corals for sale, or zoas, or acans for sale, or just acans. This would show me who has what corals for sale, or who has acans, or zoas. Just like you would do with yelp Italian food, Chinese food, etc. You can also click on the users name to see what all corals this person has in their system you could have a profile view that shows every coral in that persons tank. I would say we would give the users the ability to have multiple tanks like your show tank and frag tank 1, 2, 3 lol

Now again these are more user based ideas and not so much informational but might be cool to tie in.

I have a bunch of ideas for this kind of stuff floating up in my head and would love to contribute if I can. By night I'm a website designer for smaller local companies, and by Day I'm an I.T. Manager for a Large Vending Machine company. I have been in the technology sector for at least 13+ years

Anything I could do to help I would be more than happy to. That includes letting you use the domain CoralDatabase.com

 

[Hermie]

what about the move to auctions including facebook groups?

 

[jolt]

I like your idea very much. I would love it if we could also mine price trends and display low/hi/avg advertised prices, kind of like auto pricing sites

 

[Hemmdog]

So many brilliant ideas! I hope to see it a reality!

 

[AlexWBryant]

just to expand on possibilities, I do like the idea of http://www.zoabrary.com, but to expand on all corals, or for the pilot, just Acros. Lots of time I am looking for an Acro to fit a color. Well maybe there could be a filter for finding certain skin and polyp colors and identifying them. into groups.

 

[kapnkush608]

You could use curl and scrape multiple sites. Use like a combination of scientific sites like http://www.coralsee.org/webcat/fincat.html for classification and other sites for images/prices of specific variants. Problem is if Vendor A updates their site structure it could cause issues with the hook that is getting the info. I guess you could pull it down into a database and run the curl hook and use like php to compare the values and only update valid info. That way if I get a null value returned from the hook it will just display the last valid data in the DB.

 

[TaylorJames]

If automagically was a typo, do you mind if I claim that word and take credit for it? It might be the best one I've ever heard

I use that word quiet often haha

I own the domain CoralDatabase.com I have been sitting on it for some time I have fiddled with the idea even created a couple sites but never ended up with anything I was really pleased with publishing.

My initial envision was users would be able to sign up for accounts and keep track of all the corals they have purchased. They can upload a picture of the coral, the name, vendor/person they got it from, date, price, URL, etc to the coral. I was thinking we could even allow the users to upload progression shots as well. So more for the users but I also wanted it to include as much information on all corals as possible and have a huge informational section.

Now piggybacking off of your idea we could have it where if a user clicks on the Golden Jawdropper it could show users and Vendors that have this coral in their tank and even better which users currently have this coral up for sale! Even if the person doesn't have the coral up for sale maybe the end user could still direct message them to see if they would be willing to frag it. take that a step further lets say I noticed TaylorJames had the Golden Jawdropper I could click on his picture and see the latest progression picture so i know how big the coral currently is (this is dependent on user updating photos of course) as well as see other corals you have for sale or in your tank that I may want. Maybe even some tank specs along with equipment could be part of the users profile.

What if you could do this:: what if I could pull up this coral database app on my phone and it would show me what corals are in the area lol. So I'm from Ohio, Lets say I was traveling for work in St.Louis. I could pull up this app in St. Louis and filter it by lets say corals for sale, or zoas, or acans for sale, or just acans. This would show me who has what corals for sale, or who has acans, or zoas. Just like you would do with yelp Italian food, Chinese food, etc. You can also click on the users name to see what all corals this person has in their system you could have a profile view that shows every coral in that persons tank. I would say we would give the users the ability to have multiple tanks like your show tank and frag tank 1, 2, 3 lol

Now again these are more user based ideas and not so much informational but might be cool to tie in.

I have a bunch of ideas for this kind of stuff floating up in my head and would love to contribute if I can. By night I'm a website designer for smaller local companies, and by Day I'm an I.T. Manager for a Large Vending Machine company. I have been in the technology sector for at least 13+ years

Anything I could do to help I would be more than happy to. That includes letting you use the domain CoralDatabase.com

Awesome ideas! Good to know, maybe we could collaborate! I started in web design ~10 years ago and slowly moved to being a engineer. I now work as a senior engineer for pond5.com and I am the CTO & Founder of PadMint.com.

 

[TaylorJames]

just to expand on possibilities, I do like the idea of http://www.zoabrary.com, but to expand on all corals, or for the pilot, just Acros. Lots of time I am looking for an Acro to fit a color. Well maybe there could be a filter for finding certain skin and polyp colors and identifying them. into groups.

Yep! It would have filters for coloring / polyp color / skin color / type:tenuis/milli/etc..

 

[Turtlesteve]

I've thought about this too....they have sites like this for plant cultivars and it's quite useful. Look at plantANT. I think it's too much for one person to take on though. Ownership by a group of hobbyists would make more sense.

 

[TaylorJames]

You could use curl and scrape multiple sites. Use like a combination of scientific sites like http://www.coralsee.org/webcat/fincat.html for classification and other sites for images/prices of specific variants. Problem is if Vendor A updates their site structure it could cause issues with the hook that is getting the info. I guess you could pull it down into a database and run the curl hook and use like php to compare the values and only update valid info. That way if I get a null value returned from the hook it will just display the last valid data in the DB.

Yea I was thinking something similar. I have the most experience with Node/javascript so I would run a headless browser on a server that would scan through selected vendor sites. I would have to keep their html structure in some sort of key file that would describe how the information is structured and pass it to the parser. I could also contact these vendors to get access to an api or rss feed (slim chance but possible). I would also setup an admin panel to sanitize the data before it gets put into a "published" state.

 

[AlexWBryant]

I’m pretty sure you could get the big name vendors to jump on board with this. If you link their site for availability, it’s just marketing for them.

 

[TaylorJames]

I’m pretty sure you could get the big name vendors to jump on board with this. If you link their site for availability, it’s just marketing for them.

I agree, it should be an easy win for them. They would just need the technical know-how. A lot of the vendors are probably using wordpress or shopify sites that I think can provide rss feeds. That would be easy if the rss feeds are enabled by default.

 

[Charlie’s Frags]

Acroholics anonymous

 

[AlexWBryant]

Acroholics anonymous

Rarely have we seen a person fail, who has thoroughly followed the acro guide!

 

[DesertReefT4r]

Great idea for sure. We need a good source of info for sps coral ID.

 

[Javamahn]

I’m pretty sure you could get the big name vendors to jump on board with this. If you link their site for availability, it’s just marketing for them.

Could start with base listing and add subscription levels for vendors whose hands are now tied with new Facebook selling rules