Tuesday, February 14, 2017
Those who read my personal blog [It's Personal], know that I maintain a Facebook Page for Hanover, MD Businesses which attempts to highlight the many businesses & happenings in my hometown.
Hanover, Maryland these days seems more like an ever growing metropolis, rather than the mid-size town I moved to in 1996.
There are several reasons for this...
- Arundel Mills [huge outlet mall that hosts big outlets for major retailers like Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Ave] opened in 2000. See a complete list here.
- Maryland Live! Casino opened in 2012
- Proximity to Fort Meade and the National Security Agency.
- It also does not hurt that an international airport, BWI is less than 5 miles away.
When I started the FB Hanover, MD Business Page in 2010, I thought I would connect with other business owners in the area, even though my business, QiSoftware is listed with a Columbia address.
In 2013 or so, I started listing websites and Facebook pages for the businesses or events in the area.
New features that I want to add to the pages include:
- Hanover, MD Jobs, currently the "Use App" button on the Facebook page
- Area Events, The Casino and RamsHead Stage often offer headliners.
- Real Estate, another area that has grown quite a bit.
To that end, today, I built two new interfaces that I will eventually integrate as page tabs for the FB Hanover MD Business page. One offering, area jobs as provided by Indeed, and the other, area events offered by Eventful.
Shown below, the new servlets running in stand-alone mode on my Macbook. Just behind the two windows showing the output from each, is the Netbeans IDE which is providing the local server I use for implementation, testing and debug for most of the software I develop.
There are several restrictions when integrating widgets and interfaces on Facebook pages, including size restrictions and using resources from secure sites. Neither of my sites, qisoftware.com nor hosting-q.com uses SSL certifications, however I hope to incorporate this feature to one or both of the sites- sometime in the future.
In the meantime, I do have other options for installing the new interfaces to the Hanover MD Business Page-- as a tab on the Facebook page, however want to hold off to investigate as many options as possible. Hopefully, I will have these new interfaces in place in the near future.
