It’s that time again in London: there’ll be a huge queue on Monday morning in tube stations across the capital, as people renew their travelcards.

However, if you commute on the London Underground, Monday to Friday, then you probably shouldn’t buy a travelcard. Indeed, for my own travel pattern, an annual travelcard is £249 more than simply paying by Oyster prepay. It’s just as convenient, since auto-topup allows you to simply use it as you would a travelcard, too.

Presenting Prepay or Travelcard, a website I’ve quickly whipped up that does the maths for you. Spread the word – it could just save you a ton of money this year. And it just takes two minutes to see if you can save, too.

(Worth pointing out that, while it doesn’t assume you only commute, it does assume that you only take two trips a day, naturally, and never use buses.)

A little techie background (turn away now, this is dull)

In making this website, I wanted to understand how quick it was to set up a new website only using Google’s technologies.

The domain-name was registered by visiting Google Apps for Your Domain, which I did just after 5.00pm today (Friday). Ordinarily, I’d have visited my normal domain-name host, but this time I wanted to keep things simple, so simply registered a new domain through Google. It does keep things -very- simple indeed; the domain was up and working within minutes (and even gets mail – james (at)prepayortravelcard.com is yet another email address that’ll get to me).

Second, www.prepayortravelcard.com is hosted on Google App Engine. , which meant I needed to learn how to use Python (and Django templates) pretty quickly. This was surprisingly easy – Google has some useful hello world documentation which was very helpful. I’d done some vague fiddling over Christmas which introduced me to the concepts, but this was the first time I’d used the tools in anger.

Third, naturally, I wanted to at least attempt to monetise it – Google AdSense comes to the rescue, boringly (it took two minutes to get the code); and fourthly, I wanted to measure it, so Google Analytics also steps in (it took only one minute to get the code for that). The animation for the “see how we worked it out” is courtesy of jQuery, which Google also hosts.

The full overview that you probably need to know is that from initial thought of the site to full deployment (with the simple style prettifications) took a total of six hours, including one hour, fittingly, for commuting. And the site’s cost a total of £6, for the domain name.

Now – yes, the site’s actually perfectly possible to make using nothing but JavaScript – this version moves the maths into Python, rather than earlier versions of this script I’ve done in the past using JavaScript, which means it’s rather slower to use – particularly since I’ve made it use page refreshes (to assist Google AdSense) rather than nice Ajaxy DIVs. But then, the point of this was, actually, to understand how quick Google is to use as a development tool. And the answer is: very.

Photo: Rachel Lovinger. Used under licence.

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Tags: analytics, app engine, development, google, London, oyster, prepay, python, topup, transport, travelcard, underground | Permalink | Comments RSS