Old Tin Roof

To help the Uni­ver­sity of Cen­tral Lan­cashire Student’s Union to pro­mote their elec­tions, and to pro­vide a cen­tral repos­i­tory of elec­tion infor­ma­tion they employed me to build them a Face­book Application.

The appli­ca­tion was made of two parts: the first part aggre­gated a num­ber of feeds from Flickr, YouTube, and a cou­ple of the Uni­ver­sity web­sites, cached the data then dis­played them in the top sec­tion of the app.  The sec­ond was built as an admin tool that allowed the Union staff to upload pho­tos, and man­i­festos for each of the candidates.

The back end of the app ran on Rails, and relied on some heavy caching to make sure that the app was respon­sive to requests from Face­book.  The front end of the app was writ­ten in FBML, and used some of the built in func­tion­al­ity of the Face­book API to hook into the user page (to dis­play a badge), and allow the user to for­ward to friends.

The app was con­sid­ered exper­i­men­tal by the Union, but was suc­cess­ful in that it gained roughly dou­ble the amount of ‘fans’ as they expected.

Respon­si­bil­i­ties

• Design; from ini­tial con­ver­sa­tions through to completion
• Front end coding
• Server side devel­op­ment & implementation

Tech overview

• Built in Ruby on Rails 2.0
• Used the Face­book API & FBML markup code
• Aggre­gates sev­eral RSS feeds