George Gruenfeld

George has been a Canadian outdoors writer for, let's say, a few decades. He has edited and contributed to many outdoor publications in Canada, first in print. Yes that papery stuff, and then in the digital realm too.

While known for his work in the outdoor writing field George has had a secret passion. Apples. The apple data on this website has been worked on by George for decades. His plan was initially to publish a comprehensive encyclopedia in print, now this extensive work has been converted to a sizable database and published for the world to enjoy.

Unlike in the print world, updates are being made to existing apples and new apples are being added frequently. The world of apples is not as static as some might think.

George updates the website, and you'll often see this with many updates showing up on the 'Recently updated' section of the site

Paul Hill

Paul has been a programmer, of one kind or another, his whole adult life.

Initially working in the financial sector on programming associated with mathematical modelling, he has always enjoyed a technical challenge.

Paul is now a website designer/programmer who now mostly uses: laravel, php, sql, javascript, css and html. These technologies are the foundation of this website that you are using now.

Though not 'THE' apple guy, he does have a passion for them and with the guidance of George is slowly building up a small orchard on his property on Vancouver Island

The story behind the site

The data for this was taken from George's original manuscript for what was to become a print book. The book was being written in Quark Express, a desktop publishing tool.

The first major task to get text that was largely unstructured into a form that would be held in a database and be flexible, with all the fields broken out: summary, synonyms, brix, tannins etc. The document was converted to plain text, then a long serious of greps where applied to the text to get the relevant fields broken out. This was a long process of trial and error with some gnarly regular expressions. Thankfully George had written the manuscript largely using repeated templates so the grep treatment worked well. Mostly!

Once the fields where broken out SQL was generated to get the text into a mysql database, this database was chosen because we intended to use laravel as the framework for the website. After the initial database load we had almost 8,000 entries and a lot of cleanup. Paul built a website for private use, for him and George, between the two of them they cleaned up entries that were weird, poor, or broken. This phase of cleanup took months, the site was still effectively unpublished as we got ready for prime time. During this phase the backend administrative functions were developed, particularly, the edit page for apple data. It was critical to get an efficient process here as George sometimes makes 30 or more updates in a day.

Eventually we settled on a name for the site. Not as easy as you think. You might have heard of a small tech company that tends to come up for the first 1,000 or more entries when you google Apple.

The techy details

Hosting is on the digital ocean platform and that is managed by the laravel forge service. Images are hosted from digital ocean spaces, which is basically like amazon s3.

The front end is based on bootstrap 4. There is a smattering of Vue, javascript and axios. We are looking very seriously at using 'livewire' alpine.js for some more interactive features. The design is completely custom thereafter.

Now

George is still updating and adding apples and Paul is feverishly coding away to add new features. We appreciate you using our site, and coming here to read about us.

We are open to feedback and suggestions, please use the contact us link to reach out. If you could promote our site amongst your friends, whether thats with social medial or old fashioned talking to people we would really appreciate that.

Paul & George

PS: Paul does websites and programming for other people too, so if you are looking for a website or a technical problem solved, please get in touch