Inspiration
Ever tired of not knowing what is happening in your city ? Just connect with this webapp and take the pulse of the city in terms of projects and what are people doing. Currently, all the projects and events that are implemented or are bound to be implemented in Timisoara are lacking transparency and media coverage. This idea behind this is to centralize all of them and easily provide all the necessary information about the status and progress of each and every project/event.
What it does
The project aims to be an aggregator of all the projects and events that are happening in Timisoara. We provide relevant information by parsing data we receive from our web-crawlers that regularly check for news, statuses and updates about each of them. As a visitor, one can browse through the project/event and even sign-up as a volunteer for one or more (if the said one is in need of volunteers).
How we built it
We are using Ruby on Rails mainly. For UI we used a material design library from Google. Backend wise we used the following:
- Devise to handle login, user and project management
- Sidekiq for scheduling background jobs for the crawlers
- Nokogiri for the web-crawlers
- Ruby RSS for the RSS-parsers
Challenges we ran into
Crawling the web for results (surfing the web is much easier!!!)
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Nokogiri and RSS parsers
- Facebook event parser
What we learned
How to crawl on the web :)
What's next for CityBeat
Improve the crawlers even more to allow them to automatically add new projects as soon as they find info about a new project
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