Crazy Or Genius?: Tag tigerevents

A Conferencing We Shall Go

Sean — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 15:35:00 +0200

Ah….. hard to believe it has been almost 4 months since my last post. There always seems to be just one more thing that needs to be done.

The most recent and exciting item was a recent conference. A few months ago, myself, Oliver, and Chris were invited to a local conference called The Student Edge. The conference was partially organized by an ex-DSU president, and he kindly gave us the opportunity to talk about our experiences building software for the DSU. The conference was somewhat different than other ones I have been to, with roughly a third of the time spent on ad-hoc information exchange sessions, where the attendees basically shared their own stories (Societies Anonymous!), and the other 2/3rds more traditional talks.

Our talk, titled “Help Societies Help You: Using the Internet to Build a Better Campus” was well received by about a third of the attendees. We tried to not only tell our own story, but to convey the message that if 3 students can build some applications for the DSU, then maybe they can leverage their own student population in order to do some cool stuff.

A lot of work was put into this from the slides, to the videos that Chris put together, to the new site and demo that Oliver put together, as well as some kick ass business cards that Oliver managed to make at the last minute. Our talk ended up being almost exactly the length we expected (a somewhat new experience for me, maybe I am getting the hang of this conference thing!) partially due to the fact that Oliver went into some additional detail, whereas I talked a bit too fast again (ok, maybe my conference habits could still use a little work…). We had a little brainstorming/Q&A session after, which ended up being mostly Q&A, though there were several comments about things that people liked in what they saw.

The more interactive part was the Tech Showcase that we set up for the following day. This was where we received the bulk of feedback, conversation, and ideas. Many people were fairly positive about the systems we had. One individual who attended the talk brought over someone else from their student union at the demo station we had set up. Part way through our talk and demo, the person that had attended the talk kinda jumped in and demoed the functionality himself. I was pleasently surprised by this, as I wasn’t expecting someone to become engaged so quickly.

Other people came over to talk about where we want to go with this, and where we think we stand with other systems, notably Facebook. This is a topic we anticipated and brought up in our talk, and some of the dialogue was pretty interesting. Mainly it comes down to access and community. Wheras Facebook is centred around an individual, and you find things by who you are friends with (for the most part), wheras our work centres around the community, and providing individuals the ability to find information without jumping through any hoops. There was also talk about integration and Facebook widgets, and what are take on those topics were.

Finally, we also got a glimpse of ‘the competition’. UWO’s student union apparently contracted out a similar system to ours (with a few key differences) and it was on display at the Tech Showcase. It was also a contrast to our showcase. UWO was shown as an organization willing to buy, and we were shown as an organization willing to build..

All in all it was a great conference and a great opportunity, and I am glad I was able to take advantage of it.

TigerEvents 0.7.1 - It's About Time

Sean — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 02:35:00 +0100

So….. I have actually had a release version of Tigerevents for a long time now. 0.7.0 is actually powering my.dsu.ca now, but was never officially released. As I added several features since then, as mentioned a while ago, I decided to just increment the release number, and push it out there.

This decision was prompted by an organization other than the DSU contacting me, saying they wanted to use it, and if I could just add this one little feature enhancement…...

Needless to say, the idea of other people using this pleases me, and hopefully in the near future I can point out to other in production instances.

The code, as always, is available at the Sourceforge, and Rubyforge locations for download.

Formats, Microformats, and Exporting, Oh My!

Sean — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 19:27:00 +0200

The other day, I came across this Microformat Bookmarklet, designed to extract hcard and hCalendar markup from a website and into a format that people can use. ‘Hey’, I though, ‘that’s pretty cool, why don’t I use those in places’.

It was the motivator that finally got me to fix a long open feature request for TigerEvents. Now, the event view has hCalendar markup for those who care.

Once that was done, I thought, since I had already done hCal, why not figure out iCal export? Easier than I would have thought, thanks to the iCalendar gem and the send_data method. Now people can grab iCalender export by individual event, group, or category. People should even be able to subscribe to iCal files and have events automatically shown in their calendar app (if said app has this feature). Only future events are shown, however, in order to cut down on file size.

Finally, while I was working on the above, a friend stopped by, saw what I was doing and commented, ‘you know… it would be awesome if I could click on a link and have the event loaded into my google calendar’. So, quickly scouring the web came up with Google Calendar event publishing guide and after a few minutes, I managed to add that functionality as well.

Now for RSS feeds…

Back At It

Sean — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 17:18:00 +0200

Some people might have noticed that the my.dsu.ca site has gotten a makeover. This visual overhaul was performed by the talented Andrew Shouldice. This overhaul has garnered a lot of positive feedback so far, and it is my hope that prettier site = more visited site.

Besides some obvious visual enhancements, some long standing backend items have made their way into the release. Notably, tags have replaced categories, meaning that individuals no longer have to scroll through a multitude of categories to select the one wanted. Additionally, there are a few more options for finding events, notably searching, and browsing by group.

There are still a few things that could be done better, notably with how categories are browsed (alphabetical as opposed to by order perhaps), how items are displayed on the front page (a month’s worth of events is hard to scroll through, though that is a sign that it is being used more).

All in all, this transition has made me want to do even more work on it a bit more often. As always, any comments and criticizms are more than welcome.

Dal Gazette Article - The Real Deal

Sean — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 11:34:00 +0100

Last week, Oliver and I were interviewed by the Dalhouse Gazette regarding TigerEvents, my.dsu.ca and Dal-ACM related items. The original plan, at least to my understanding, was that there would be a small blurb this week, with a larger article in the new year. I was not, however, expecting the article that actually was produced. Unfortunatly, I have to agree with several individuals that felt that it was poorly written and misleading. I don’t have any explanations, but thought that I would try to rewrite things so that they were clearer.

Local Students’ Software More Popular Than Expected

The “extracurricular hobby�? of two of Dalhousie Universities’ Computer Science students, Sean Smith and Oliver Baltzer, has taken off on both Sourceforge and Rubyforge, which contain thousands of open source projects. TigerEvents, the software powering the my.dsu.ca website, has achived a small measure of success over the past three months since its public debut, being downloaded roughly 150 times, and being propelled into the top five percent of active projects on both sites.

“It was a little unexpected,�? says undergrad student Sean Smith.

Smith and PhD candidate Oliver Baltzer released the program as open source software in September after spending the summer developing it with several other computer science students at the request of the DSU. However, after its public release, other users started looking at it for real world usage, including individuals as far away as the Netherlands.

Open source, for those who don’t know, is free software that can be downloaded not only for free use, but for modification as well. “Think of it as software made by the community for the community. It’s all about giving something back to the community,” explains Oliver Baltzer.

Baltzer and Smith say the feedback they receive from users also helps them improve the program. They expect the number of people downloading and using the program will increase over the next few months as they continue to make improvements. “We have a lot of ideas,” states Smith, “and if we are lucky, not only will we get people using the software, but actively helping with improvements as well.” They try to make new releases and updates to the program, as well as the my.dsu.ca site, every few weeks.

Smith and Baltzer are members of a society called the Dal-ACM, which is a student chapter of the worldwide Association for Computing Machinery. The Dal-ACM, in conjunction with the DSU, is currently discussing a number of online programs, including online society ratification, grants applications and an improved version of Tiger Books, the DSU’s online textbook exchange.

All the software for those projects would be released as an open source software package called Tiger Suite, says Baltzer, which could be used by other universities for their own purposes.

TigerEvents Breaks 50! (Downloads That Is)

Sean — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 01:27:00 +0100

One month after the first official release of TigerEvents and we have achieved the following:

31 downloads on Sourceforge
20 downloads on RubyForge
17 downloads directly from TigerOnRails
Currently Ranked 3,682/105,551 projects on Sourceforge (Top 5%!)
Currently Ranked 83/999 Projects on RubyForge (Top 10%!)
One individual (from the Netherlands) actually testing out trunk and submitting tickets

Wow, this totally, totally exceeds expectations.

Woo! TigerEvents 0.5.0 Public Release

Sean — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 12:42:00 +0200

Finally, after long hours, little sleep, and lots of work, the 0.5.0 release of TigerEvents, code named “It’s Finally Our So I Can Take A Break” was released the other day on both Sourceforge and Rubyforge.

The focus of this release was getting all the proper administration interface stuff working properly (sorry front end only users) and trying to document it enough so a person can take the code, set it up, and run it on another machine.

Now that the initial file release is out, all I have to do is upgrade my.dsu.ca (merging is going to be a pain in the ass), work on 0.6.0 (which involves merging my development branch back into the trunk, ugh), and redo that ugly, ugly interface.

Regarding the interface, I plan to do something even more minimalistic than some people’s ideas (the one’s I am getting are awesome though, don’t stop). It will, at the very least, grant more open space, as opposed to cramming everything important into a small area. A primary advantage of starting out small is that it will be simple (except for all the XMLHTTPRequest stuff I need to do), and if people want more, I just add more, instead of scalling back and forth.

Oh, and I will do my best to get rid of that blinking text box.

A License To Bitch

Sean — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 21:16:00 +0200

As already mentioned I have been working on a project called TigerEvents, which powers the my.dsu.ca website.

This project, written entirely in Ruby On Rails, took 4 part time students 2 months to code a working, publicably usable beta. Pretty sweet, since some of us had other, paying, supposedly full time jobs on the go as well, and all of us had other responsibilities.

The my.dsu.ca website has gotten 102430 requests since Aug 25. Not bad I suppose, but I think we can do better than that.

The main problems? I know it, you know, it’s the visual layout. Sure it sucks. A layout like this is when a graphical artist that is supposed to do work totally flakes out and techies are left in charge. Also high up on that list is usability. Some things work well, some things…...... not so well (hey, it’s beta). So how do we fix this? Well…..... I am hoping that you, the public, the intended audience, the actual, non-involved USERS could give me a hand here. Let me know what you like, let me know what you don’t like, let me know what YOU would like to see.

Go ahead, chew me out, rip it to shreds, praise it, stomp it, love it, hate it. Just give me something I can use.