Hey Everyone!

I'm sorry to announce that I have to put the www.BillSplit.com project on pause while I handle some of my for-profit side work.  Yes, like everyone else, I have bills to pay and mouths to feed.  So you free-loaders are just going to have to wait a couple of weeks for any new additions or bug fixes. :P

Send me an email or leave a comment (I'm notified of new comments via email) if you have any feature requests or bug reports.

Hey, who knows, maybe I'll be able to sneak in a few hours here and there to make some random updates.

Take care,
Dean :)

PS, I'd like to leave you with this sage bit of 8-bit Nintendo Contra advice:
Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A-B-A-Select-Start!
That is all.

I should have been working on www.BillSplit.com updates.  Instead, I got... sidetracked.

My wife and I went to Costco this weekend and bought a pineapple for $2.99 and now look what I've done! -_- *sigh* this is what happens when "modders" go into withdrawal.

Anyway, I'd like to thank my dear wife for putting up with this crazy "otaku" ~~~ baby I love you!! :D

Can you spot the shameless attempts at self-advertisement??

Ladies
and
Gentlemen..gentlemen..gentlemen..
I present to you..to you..to you...

The Spongebob Squarepants Pineapple!

(click on the pictures for larger images)

Close-Ups of the Spongebob Squarepants Pineapple
  
    

Needless to say, there won't be any www.BillSplit.com code updates tonight.

Dean :)

You can now save and delete your BillSplits!

I added a BillSplit Management panel that allows you to save, delete and open previously saved BillSplits.

I struggled on placement of the BillSplit Management panel and ended up settling for a simple non-rounded corner css box.

As an afterthought, I added a few handy features.  After opening a saved BillSplit, it runs the calculation for you to show everything.  Same goes for the Save As.

BillSplit Basic is 100% cookie-based.  This means I don't have to mess around with a server-side database and it also means the application is scalable beyond your wildest imaginations with ZERO administration complexities.  No session state to worry about, no worries about load balanced servers not communicating, no worries about anything really.

Next update will improve error handling in Bill List and People List adding.  I'm also planning on adding simple math function support on the Amount textboxes.  This way, if you've already set "Bob" as pre-paying $27 for the water bill, but realize later that he also paid $15 for his share of the beer on Friday night, you could go into "Bob's" Pre-Paid text and just append "+15" in the field to have it automatically calculate the sum! Sure, you can do $27+15 in your head (when you're not drunk), but what about $39.83+12.29?  Ok fine, so your math isn't that horrible.  But really, the whole reason for BillSplit's existence to make our lives easier. Like sliced bread.

I should finish the rest of the tabs too.

-Dean :)

Updates Tonight:

I found this REALLY GROOVY font called Dolphin from 1001fonts.com

... So I updated the banner with the cool font!

Here's a pic of the before and after:

 

I also updated the "How It Works" section of the page.  Here's the text that I added (with pictures!)

 

How Does BillSplit.com Work?

 

BillSplit.com QuickStart Instructions

Creating a BillSplit takes only 3 easy steps!

1. Add Bills to the Bills list

2. Add People to the Person List

3. Click "Calculate BillSplit"

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How does the BillSplit get calculated?

These pages are written in ASP.NET with VB.NET in the code behind the pages.  The BillSplit engine class is designed to accept a dataset of Bills and People and returns a set of plain-english instructions detailing who pays and receives money to and from whom. (That was a mouthful).  The logic for BillSplit Basic starts by calculating the total of all the bills.   This total is then divided by the number of people included in the BillSplit to determine each person's share of the bill.  A set of nested loops with intelligent logic iterates through the list of people who pre-paid the bills to determine how much this person is owed and which person to best pay to settle the balances with the least number of transactions. (Another mouthful).  These nested loops actually generate an output dataset.  The data in this dataset looks something like this: (more to come)

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Where's my DATA stored?

Your data isn't stored anywhere on my server! Hard to believe? Well it's true! First of all, I really have no interest in your data (sorry to disappoint!).  In fact, the data is sent back to your computer as a cookie.  The cookie contains your Bills and People list as a compressed string.  This cookie takes up very little space on your hard drive (less than 1000 bytes) -- that's smaller than Google's homepage logo image!

Storing the data in your computer's cookie container makes my work a LOT easier.  I don't need to worry about designing or maintaining fancy state-of-the-art databases and YOU don't have to worry about registration or log in!

Just understand that if you ever feel the urge to tidy up your computer and clear out your cookies, your BillSplit data will be cleared out as well.

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Can I share BillSplit data with other people? Can I save my BillSplit data?

I'm working on this functionality.  More to come.

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How does this site make money?

I don't have any plans on making money with this site (other than accepting donations if you'd like to buy me a drink).  I feel that I've gained so much from the Internet (free email, awesome search engines, free chat programs, music - legal of course, etc) that I should be giving back somehow.  This is my contribution back to the community. 

Updates tonight:

Added labels for Edit/Save/Undo/Delete buttons on Bills and People lists. Thanks to Vy for the suggestion.

Added a "Click to add Bill/Person" note on Bills and People lists to make it more obvious how to add a new person. Thanks to Holden for the suggestion.

Major thanks to Kal-EL on EFnet #ASP.NET for the tip to set the LABEL text instead of CELL text.  On re-draws, the blank label text was writing over the cell text and causing the "click to add" to disappear. I was baffled and spent hours trying to get past this.  There were so many variables ... poorly formated CSS styles? Bug with AJAX? I tried everything before Kal-EL had a great suggestion to try setting Label text instead of Cell text.

I do this at the risk of being mistaken for a sleezy Multi-Level-Marketing salesperson offering "A once-in-a-lifetime, ground-level business opportunity" ....

I just went to www.vistaprint.com and ordered a free set of 250 business cards to promote www.BillSplit.com.  They won't be arriving for another 2 weeks, since I selected the standard processing (14 days).  After shipping and "processing" the total came out to $8.95.  How are they able to offer this for "free?"  There's an ad for vistaprint.com on the back of every card.

 

Now, don't mistake me for a cheapskate (even though I am in some ways).  I've already spent HOURS/DAYS/WEEKS on the website and programming.  This is a FREE site, for the good of the Internet/Mankind/World.  I should get some sort of anti-cheapskate points for that.  Money-wise I want to spend as little as possible to get the word out about www.BillSplit.com -- I'll do it as a one-man-show, one person at a time... otherwise how are people supposed to find out?

So my plan is to take these business cards and distribute them onto campus post boards, onto people's cars, near dorms, apartments with student roomates etc.  I'm not asking for any money, and I haven't even implemented Google Ads yet.  I equate Google Ads to playing the penny slots in Vegas.  I won't make much money, and the money I get probably won't even be enough to buy lunch.  But it'll still be fun to see the numbers, however small they may be.

Someone asked me about www.BillSplit.com, "How's this going to make money?"  My answer was, "I don't care if it makes money or not. As long as people use it and appreciate it I'll be happy"

 

Please post your feature requests as comments to this entry.

Groovy.

Dean :)

Hey Folks,

I've never done this blog thing before, but how's it looking for my first try?  I modifed a dasBlog template (Elegante) to fit the layout of BillSplit.com ... not too shabby for a blog newb huh?

Dean :)