Contact Local Officials Form

• Visitors may choose from a drop down of local officials and send a message.

Constant Contact Integration

• E-mail list sign-up.
• Users can specify their Ward in Washington, D.C.
• Info is stored in client’s Constant Contact account

Improved User Experience

• Implementation of enhanced visual design with direct calls to action.

Event Management

• RSVP
• e-mail notification
• calendar display
• event promotion & discussion via Twitter #hashtags.

Social Media Integration

• Visitors can easily share content services such as Twitter & Facebook.
• New content is sent to Twitter & Facebook.
• Promote discussion of content via Twitter.

About Defeat Poverty DC

Defeat Poverty DC is a coalition of organizations and residents in the District of Columbia working to bring greater focus during the 2010 election season and beyond to the damaging effects of poverty on the entire city.

The theme features a custom admin interface with options. Additionally, the theme:

• is optimized for Search Engines
• utilizes WordPress’ gallery functionality
• uses the jQuery Colorbox, and
• integrates with Social Media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

• search call and e-mail log ( just used ActiveRecord, since it was an internal application)
• sortable tabular data using jQuery
• display statistics about calls/e-mails over time
  • line graphs
  • pie charts
  • maps

The requirements for the end result of the work was a valid CSV to serve as input for an automated script.

I did not have direct access to the content databases from my scripts. So to accurately aggregate complete data sets, I wrote a series of ruby scripts to consume the incomplete content data which, spread across a number of a spreadsheets.

In addition, I used Ruby’s net/http library and hpricot to test the resulting data sets and ensure their accuracy.

• creating a flexible feature post area to showcase
  • an adjustable number of images, and
  • an adjustable image sizes
• showing posts by category with photos in the summary
• creating a configurable ticker that
  • allows the end user to add/remove stock symbols
  • pulls in live stock prices
• creating a configurable navigation for the header and footer navigation
• configurable copyright language

Components

• Free template: by Terrafirma²
• Language: Ruby
• Framework-ish: Sinatra
• Libraries:
  • ERB (embedded ruby) for the views
  • Date
• Database: Sqlite3
• ORM: ActiveRecord
• JavaScript: jQuery,Google Maps API (Map and Geocoder for Addresses. Streetview)
• Banner Graphic: Created with free icons and GIMP

Options table

Made an options table so i can enter pieces of content that don’t need to be blog posts. E.g., tagline, sidebar, etc. You can put HTML in there or whatever.

Javascript & Google Maps

To detect the current location (semi-accurate), the JavaScript uses a spec that is not fully supported across browsers. The snippet looks like:

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(yourFunctionName, funcIfError);

Going forward, I want to examine why the map marker is off… even though the map is centered correctly.

User Agent detection

The ruby code detects the user agent making the request and is able to serve a different layout accordingly. This is useful on the iphone, which seems to choke on the Google Maps geocoding functions, but not the map functions. I did not look into this too much, probably an error in my code. The Google Street View requires flash and would not work on the iphone anyway.

I want to change the CSS and use the iUI library for iphone javascript so it feels like an iphone web app.

My script adds several things. By adding the function to WordPress’ functions.php file, we can display the events in the sidebar for example, instead of inside a WordPress post. The script displays events for the next 7 days and groups the events by day of the week. The script also allows for multiple events on a single day. For each event on a given day, a link is output, which points to the event (a post).

Last.fm does not provide a user’s Top Weekly Tracks in RSS format, so we need to also require ‘hpricot’ and parse the XML.

Here are some classes I coded which are later called in a Sinatra helper and eventually the returned data is exposed in a view. You can see this in action here.

require 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri'
require 'rss'

class LastfmWeeklyTracksXML
  def initialize(username)
    @un = username
    @url = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/#{@un}/weeklytrackchart.xml"
    @data = []
  end

  # build an array of track info using xml data
  def get_the_data
    @doc = Hpricot.XML(open(@url))
    (@doc/:track).each do |track|
      t = { :artist => track.at("artist").innerHTML, :song => track.at("name").innerHTML, :url => "http://" + track.at("url").innerHTML,:plays => track.at("playcount").innerHTML}
      @data.push(t)
    end
    return @data
  end

end

class Feed

  def initialize(url)
    @url = url
    @data = []
  end

  def read_feed
    @document = open(@url).read
    rss = RSS::Parser.parse(@document)

    rss.items.each do |item|
      @data.push({ :title => item.title, :url => item.link})
    end
    return @data
  end

end

Helper code

  # call this from the route in app.rb
  # either helpers or routes has to inherit the
  # classes for getting Last.FM xml and rss data
  def last_fm_info(datatype,username)
    case datatype
    when "loved"
      url = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/#{username}/lovedtracks.rss"
      f = Feed.new(url)
      f.read_feed
    when "recent"
      url = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/#{username}/recenttracks.rss"
      f = Feed.new(url)
      f.read_feed
    when "top-weekly"
      url = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/#{username}/weeklytrackchart.xml"
      f = LastfmWeeklyTracksXML.new(username)
      f.get_the_data
    end
  end

Code for Sinatra route

# this code would be in your app.rb file
post '/demo/last-fm' do
  datatype = params[:type]
  username = params["lastfm-un"]
  if datatype == "top-weekly"
    @weekly = last_fm_info(datatype,username)
  else
    @tracks = last_fm_info(datatype,username)
  end
  @type = datatype.gsub("-"," ")
  erb :lastfm
end