FineRadar - Solving the problem for city parking

Few days ago i released FineRadar to public. It is a simple website where you can punch in your plate number and phone number to get SMS notifications if you have any unpaid tickets. I usually forget to pay red light and parking tickets in time so i decided to give it a try and create a script that sends me a reminder every 3 days until i eventually pay.

The tech behind it is not complex, as source it uses public form to check for outstanding balance. I should say, the integration with city's service was horrible due to its implementation. I wish it was more open and friendly. But its a totally different story.

Back to the FineRadar, here is the stack it uses:

• Ruby 1.9.2
• Linode for hosting
• Sinatra as web framework
• Faraday and nokogiri for scraping data from site
• Mongo and Mongoid for data storage, free db provided by MongoLab
• Twilio for SMS delivery
• Sendgrid for email delivery

It was created just in two evenings while having some beers. Currently it supports only Chicago, but i wanted to add few more cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.

Want to help out? Send me an email or ping me on twitter.