Frequently Asked Questions

Who the hell are you people?

PennFoodTrucks is run by a bunch of guys who like quick, cheap food. During our freshman year we found it annoying that we didn't know which trucks were nearby on campus, but since we spent most of our time at Commons, it didn't really matter. As sophomores, picking a place to eat is much harder so we started gathering this information and decided to publish it for your enjoyment.

Why would you waste your time?

Well, mostly because we have nothing else to do. Between the video games and not studying, PennFoodTrucks became a fun diversion. We don't intent to monetize the site or otherwise profit off of our work, but we hope you get some use out of our efforts. If you feel the urge to buy the team a sandwich, we happily accept.

How did you collect the data?

Mostly by walking up to the trucks, taking pictures of the menus, and asking for their hours. Some trucks have printed menus, but most of the time it was just a lot of manual labor. For this reason, the data may be out-of-date. If you have corrections, we'd love to hear them.

How do you know if a truck is open?

The function to determine if a truck is open is based on the original data we collected and Eastern Standard Time (if you're not on the east coast, how does it matter if the truck is open?). If the times are wrong, let us know and we'd love to fix it. And yes, the trucks near the hospital open before sunrise, it's not a mistake.

Who owns the data on the site?

We're not lawyers, but we think the data on the site is the property of the individual truck owners. If you have an interesting project that would make use of the data, let us know and we can give you a database dump. Please don't query our server a million times in order to get it all, that's really not nice.

Are there regular updates?

Of course, but not as you might expect. Updates to the site are now run primarily by our loyal visitors (you!). If you see changes in pricing, offerings, times, or anything else, please let us know via email. Also, rank those trucks! You can see the most recent truck reviews with our RSS feed.

What language does this site use?

For you fellow geeks/webdevs, PennFoodTrucks uses the CodeIgniter framework to simplify and secure the code. Everything is hand-coded in Coda and runs on LAMP. Our host is now Dreamhost mainly because it's cheap, but we are also fairly pleased with them. If you have other questions, contact us.

The site is slow or looks broken.

Well, that's not really a question, but I'll try to answer it anyway.
  • If the site is not loading, we are probably updating the page you're trying to access. Wait a few minutes and try again.
  • If the site is generally slow, we're probably getting hammered with traffic. Our server is extremely cheap and therefore bad, so this happens sometimes. Let us know and we'll see what we can do.
  • If the page looks broken, you're browser is probably to blame. I know you don't need another person to suggest you use Firefox, and I'm sure you have your reasons for loving IE, but try the other options out there. I recommend Opera (all OSs) or Camino for Mac users if you don't like Firefox. Everything should work in IE7 and there's really no reason for you to still use IE6, so if you find a problem that you don't think is a browser issue, let us know.

Those are all the problems I could think of. If there's something else, contact us.