node.js ko
whatdidyou.com
whatdidyou.com
by The semicolons;
whatdidyou.com is a web site that allows you to share your activities with your friends.
Stuck for a decent recipe for tonights supper? Checkout what your buddy Steve cooked last night, last week…
Judging Instructions
Go to http://whatdidyou.com
Should work on all major browsers (IE >= 8) and most mobile browsers.
Who
masylum — Barcelona
saimonmoore — Barcelona, Spain
holamon — Innsbruck
How
We’re using couchdb for persistance and elasticsearch for full text searching.
We run express with cluster behind nginx reverse proxy.
We’re use the following node modules:
- masylum/asereje
- documentcloud/backbone
- learnboost/cluster
- marak/colors
- senchalabs/connect
- tdebarochez/connect-couchdb
- cloudhead/cradle
- visionmedia/express
- marak/Faker
- masylum/funk
- visionmedia/jade
- mikeal/request
- visionmedia/stylus
- masylum/twitter-js
- documentcloud/underscore
- saimonmoore/node-backbone-couch
We also use opscode/chef for deployment and systems and configuration management.
Votes
Your Vote
Voting is now closed.
Other Votes
(25)
tiffanykjudge
jimpickjudgePretty slick! Nice selection of technologies. I’m building with a similar stack, so I was impressed by what you had there.
I think this is an awesome base to build some really fun features on top of – it would be easy to imagine tying in semantic services such as Freebase, audioscrobbling, recipe sites, etc.
samanthaquistjudgeThis is a nice way to filter for the info you’re really interested in. I like the filtering categories (eat, drink, make, read, etc) and the icons are nicely designed and intuitive. There are some usability opportunities (eg. account creation difficulties, needing to click “search”) and using an existing data repository such as Twitter or Facebook would make this infinitely more useful than having to rely on a whole new one for data/networks. But I really like the concept, it’s professionally designed, and it’s nicely executed here. Well done!
AudreyLojudgeI like how the app is very clean and easy to navigate. Good use of social media, but the idea may be a bit too similar to Twitter and Facebook status updates. However, I do like how you’ve expanded the idea of just simply posting an update to categorizing based on the post content. Good start!
blw
contestantpretty cool idea. very nice design.
- contestant
Thanks for your vote…I enjoyed playing movie master (though having young kids means I’m out of touch with most recent movies :( )
ericflojudgeThis is a really polished, really well-designed entry. I was surprised how easy it was to navigate around the site, how it already had friend groups and other little details.
I would make it easier to find friends, I didn’t want to broadcast out to twitter and didn’t want to manually search.
Also, I don’t really see myself using this. Not sure what it offers on top of what Twitter/Facebook/Google Plus provides.
That said, I’m really impressed with the app for being developed in such a short period of time and being so complete.
- contestant
Thanks for your vote Eric.
Yes finding friends right now is not either obvious or particularly easy. We’re working on this and other ways to make this go viral.
purincessjudgeI love it. Feels like twitter but reframed into actions. Now figure out how to make it viral…
- contestant
Yes we’re discussing different ways to do so. Thanks for the vote.
P.S: We’re pretty proud of what we managed to do in those 48 hours. We surprised ourselves in how productive we were when we had to focus or efforts in such a short period of time.
adinardijudgeAlthough I can see the utility in something like this (what did I/my friends do and when), I question the stickiness. I can’t see myself getting much out of it all the time unless I’m tracking something really specific and want to be able to go back and see it.
If it were able to aggregate my data from different check-in services, twitter, etc and “automatically” come up with a timeline for different types of events — that could be more useful. Getting people to post to something new is always a huge challenge.
Design was solid. Form errors required a post before telling me there was an issue. Having those checks on the client also would be a great UI enhancement.
- contestant
Thanks for the feedback,
Yeah we’re looking at different ways to make this viral. Aggregating data from check-in services is a good idea which I’ll discuss with the rest of the team.
Yes client-side validation is something that was on our nice-to-have list but didn’t make the cut for the KO but we’ll be adding shortly.
Thanks again,
Saimon
urbanpugjudgesingles
contestant
therazorbladejudgeSo it is twitter with categories?
- contestant
No. It’s not designed as a microblogging site. It will integrate with twitter and other social networks and will provide an interaction model, verb specific autocompletion and other features.
- therazorbladejudge
Ok. But the current implementation is pretty much that.
mstinaleejudgeCool idea. Can see foodie friends using this, as well as other groups that engage in political, cultural, or sports activities. Should be integrated with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and/or Foursquare, though, because this kind of info shows up as status updates, tweets and check-ins.
- contestant
Hi Tina,
Yes that’s the idea. 3rd party integration is forthcoming but we wanted to consolidate the basic features first and then ran out of time.
mdejudgeLovely site design. Fun concept. Filter buttons didn’t seem to do anything.
- contestant
Right now since you can filter by multiple parameters, you need to additionally click the ‘search’ button. If you did click ‘search’ but nothing happened then that’s a bug, which I’m unable to reproduce, and would appreciate if you could describe how to reproduce it.
Thanks
davidmoffitt
contestantI like the interface, but beyond the “ooh neat” factor don’t see it begin useful in the real world. The I “drank/ate/etc” field desperately needed type-ahead / auto complete, or some kind of normalization, and otherwise it felt like twitter mashed up with google plus but more limiting – having to fill in the “comment” as required was annoying, and I honestly did not want to fill in an email address at sign-in.
- contestant
We weere asking for the email because we wanted to send notifications on people following you but we didn’t had time. Good to know for the next knockout.
- contestant
Yes making the comment obligatory was a lapsus we’ve fixed in our private repo. We’ll update the site as soon as the judging is over…
We plan on adding autocomplete for the title field dependant on the verb but it was on our nice-to-have list for the KO so didn’t make the cut.
As Pau said, we plan on sending occasional notifications (e.g. XXX just started following you) but in the end ran out of time. We’ll be adding twitter/fb/etc login in the future.
TrevorBurnham
contestantCute. Would make more sense as a Twitter integration than a standalone site.
- contestant
We’ll be adding twitter and facebook integration as soon as we can. Ran out of time :(
davidplusplus
contestantNicely done, an amazing set of features for such a short amount of dev time. Very well planned and executed.
- contestant
Thanks David, I enjoyed playing with your entry a lot…Looking forward to seeing it evolve..
wjgilmorejudgeVery interesting, this has potential! Twitter integration would be very nice, particularly right now, in order to obtain a feel for how this would work in real-time.
- contestant
Had we the time we would have added this but we decided to get the basic site fully functional with the the minimum features we wanted before anything 3rd party. But this is definitely on the table. We’ll be adding this shortly…
acdouglasjudgeReally great to have the activity coding as a resource, but there doesnt seem to be an interaction model—didn’t see a way to comment on friends activities yet
- contestant
Yep this is planned. We just didn’t have enough time. Thanks for the vote.
dawnerd
contestantI personally wouldn’t use this, but I can see how others would. It would be neat if this hooked into other web services to get more information on whatever the person posted about. For examples, movies could pull in data from imdb, or foods could be linked to a page that showed what it was.
csanzjudge
_nw_judge
glenngillenjudgeGood design, interesting idea, and a very complete effort. Not convinced I’d find a use for it outside of twitter/foursquare and might consider it more useful if it integrated with those other services.
mustardamus
contestantcarsonmcdonald
contestant
Nice visuals. Adding filters by geography, time of day (esp. by mealtimes), social graph would make activities more relevant. Low barrier to entry by Twitter, FB, etc. if a verb-parsing app extension were added. Overall, polished product for 48 hrs' work!