Seb Lee-Delisle » IWillPayYourParkingTicket

I paid Jennifer’s parking ticket

Seb Lee-Delisle — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:06:00 +0000

If you saw my presentation at Flash on the Beach, MAX, or FlashPitt, you’ll know that I’ve been trying to get hold of Jennifer Blackwell for some time now.

After a month of voting on iwillpayyourparkingticket.com, you chose the winning tweet from twitter.com/jenwell, and I couldn’t be happier with your choice! It is so in line with the spirit of the website.

But of course my messages to Jennifer were ignored; sadly she just thought I was a British weirdo. (And she wouldn’t be entirely wrong ) So what could I do? In a last ditch effort to contact her, at Flash on the Beach, I asked the audience to tweet her to reassure her that I was genuine, and around 100 people sent her @ replies on twitter!

So to cut a long story short, I arranged to meet Jennifer in New York as her boyfriend lives in Brooklyn and our travel plans overlapped by one day. Her boyfriend Brian very kindly filmed our meeting where she told me the story of her parking ticket and when she first realised I was trying to find her. Note that just like in Minneapolis, I paid Jennifer’s ticket in a mixture of currencies

Now we’ve had our first winner, we have some more work to do on the website, including being able to see the top ten best tweets, previous winners and also adding donations so this project doesn’t ruin me

How we made it : iwillpayyourparkingticket

Seb Lee-Delisle — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:20:22 +0000

Here’s a video of my presentation from £5app a couple of weeks ago.

£5 App #19 Seb and Jamie with I Will Pay Your Parking Ticket from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.

And I’m sorry about the weird camera angle!

And Jamie Matthews, who helped me build the site, talks about it here. The project is open source and built with Django, and you can follow (or even fork it) here! (be kind to us – it’s our first Django effort!)

It’s only another week before I pay the winner’s ticket, so if you want to have your say please come and give the tweeters some love .

I will, actually, pay your parking ticket!

Seb Lee-Delisle — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:50:39 +0000

Today I am launching the most ridiculous site I’ve ever made. www.iwillpayyourparkingticket.com

It was inspired by something that happened at this year’s brilliant FlashBelt, where we all decided to get together and pay some poor guy’s parking ticket.

I don’t know why we did it, but it seemed kinda fun, and I thought that maybe the person who got the ticket would be cheered up by the fact that $24 + €5
+ £5 was in an envelope along with their parking ticket.

The next day I decided to do a search on twitter to see if I could find the the guy who’d had his ticket mysteriously paid. Sadly, I couldn’t find him. Instead, I found hundreds and hundreds of tweeters who had also got parking tickets. Some of them were angry, some were sympathetic, and some were just downright weird.

But they were all interesting!

So I got together with my good friend Jamie Matthews and made iwillpayyourparkingticket.com. It agregates all the parking ticket related tweets on twitter, and allows you to send the poor tweeters love, depending on how much you think they deserve.

Every month, I will then find the one that has had the most love, and pay their ticket for them!

It’s been ages since I last did any web programming (ie not Flash) and it’s come such a long way! I discovered Django, thanks to Simon Willison, the brilliant Brighton geek responsible for the recent crowd-sourcing MP expense report reviewing system at the Guardian.

And I also discovered jQuery, Cufon, and the Yahoo css reset code.

But I have to admit, Jamie did most of the hard work on the server side. I just decided what colour things should be, and of course wrangled with the front end stuff.

I’m still trying to figure out how to make the site more sticky, and of course, figure out exactly how to get the money to the people. And perhaps also allow people to donate money so I don’t have to pay it all myself? Who knows!?

And, in line with my new policy of making as much of my work open source as possible, we’re releasing it with a BSD license and you can check it all out on github.

Please try out the site, let me know what you think, and I’ll keep you informed of how it goes!