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Saturday 30 January 2010

Coding in Istanbul 1: PHP in Turkey

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I’m having a çoban kavurma in a restaurant with my old mate Jeff who lives in Istanbul. We stopped for lunch in one of the busy pedestrian streets of Kadiköy on the Asian side of the city.

We spent most of yesterday coding on Jeff’s doctors appointment website. We added a small admin functionality that will save him time when mailing doctors. He’s currently working on getting more doctors registered: it involves finding their details and emailing them one by one. Obviously spamming them all in one go is out of the question so each email is slightly personalised (quoting the doctor’s own website). Yet they all follow the same template so there is some room for automation.

Jeff also needs to track how doctors open and view the campaign emails. Each email contains a number of links: to the appointment’s website, press articles, facebook and to twitter. Pretty clever: each link calls a php on his website that logs the doctor’s identifier along with the identifier of the link. Then he can run a report that shows various stats about who clicked what link…

Good places to take the netbooks out in Turkey include a growing number of restaurants, Starbucks, Gloria Jeans… and Wifi is almost always free!

Gloria Jeans is a great place to sit down with the laptop: more comfortable than Starbucks and less crowded. The one in Ortaköy is perfect: beautiful view to the Bosphorus, 3 levels, smoothies, cheesecakes, tosts (paninis) and free wifi.


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