In fact, you don't even have to allow delete - you can just let the users 'hide' them. That way, if I want to offer the same swap, I can just 'unhide' it. :-)
Out of curiosity, what's the stack? I read Heroku & MongoDB. I'm guessing it is an Ember.js app?
EDIT: unhide not unidentified. Damn you auto correct!
It uses the free Heroku instance with the free MongoHQ addon. That way if the site failed completely I wouldn't be out of pocket! If it keeps being used we'll either stump up some cash for Heroku or look at other hosting options. For now the free Heroku is fine, and the free MongoHQ addon still has enough space, particularly as we're storing so little.
There's no Ember or any similar framework, just a bit of jQuery that does the search filtering (which I want to improve - the entire site is a result of a 3-4 hour hack yesterday, plenty can be improved upon).
It's a small Ruby app that uses Sinatra, with Mongoid my gem of choice for talking to MongoDB. Uses the omniauth gem to authenticate with Twitter, and that's about it. Dead simple :)
For a few-hour hack, it has been done quite beautifully, I must say. Kudos!
I'm more of a Django/Python guy myself and I've been running a few of my own self-learning projects on Heroku, too. So yeah, I know where you're coming from. :)
You might want to look into using Bootstrap Typeahead.js to auto-tag topics posted by users. I recently got it working with a bit of jQuery on one of my own projects by using Django Rest Framework to serve the corresponding JSON content. It may even help you auto-match users in the future! (I'd like my ESOPs now, please. :P)
I wish I knew how to Rails, but I've only just begun with Django, so I suspect I may not be of much use to you with the code. :(
Good luck, and may this project take you places! :)
> In fact, you don't even have to allow delete - you can just let the users 'hide' them. That way, if I want to offer the same swap, I can just 'unhide' it. :-)
Yes - there is already a flag for this in the model, but the functionality on the front-end to mark it as complete didn't get finished (yet).
Do you know how we would go about doing it? (That's not a snarky Q - I genuinely don't know!). I too would love to but I'm unsure as to how to reliably do it - and in the mean time gender-neutral was a safer bet.
You could tie it in with letting the user specify the name to display; changing away from using Twitter handles is probably not a bad thing anyway. Thus you could have as part of the sign-up process:
1. Call me _________
2. Refer to me as
( ) male ("he")
( ) female ("she")
(x) gender-neutral or plural ("they")
( ) actually, we're a group ("they")
For e.g. Twitter sign-up, you'd auto-fill the first with their username and the second with gender-neutral.
That does sound rather awkward and could hopefully be improved upon. (I added the final option as it occurred to me businesses could use this.)
I agree that the concept of displaying "he" or "she" would indeed be an improvement, but I feel as though the only way to get over the awkwardness of the form questions you defined would be to go through some kind of "profile builder".
This obviously takes the app to a new place - now talking about some sort of profile system - this would obviously be a huge feature to add with a load of other implications.
Currently it's on Heroku, using the free instance and the MongoHQ addon. Find it perfect for little side projects like this, especially when launching at first to see if the idea is any good or not.
Thanks! The idea was to keep it stupidly simple, and not limit what people could ask for / search for. Had a couple of people ask if non web dev topics were allowed - to which my reply was "of course!"
I really, really like the idea. However, I neither have nor want a Twitter account. Would it really be difficult to allow people to use the site without a Twitter account?
They are indeed Government sites! GOV.UK itself is looked after by the Government Digital Service (GDS). A brief history is available on the GDS blog: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/about/. It's also different in that it's coded in the open. Most of the code behind GOV.UK is on public Github repositories: https://github.com/alphagov.
Thank you so much for this. I've no idea why I didn't think of this initially - but I've now rewritten the plugin to do this instead. Hope you like it - and thanks again!
