One of the key things that is missing from the FOSS Box @ RIT is a slick timeline that can show the world what we've been up to - something that's polished and comprehensive. Remy Decausemaker's forked version of MIT's Simile Exhibit project fit the bill perfectly. The project uses a whole bunch of javascript magic to render its visuals, but at its source, generates its content from a single contributors file.
Adding entries to the timeline is trivial. It's just a matter of going from this and this to a series of formatted entries:
{ "type" : "Event", "label" : "ImagineRIT 2010", "discipline" : "Event", "date" : "2010-05-01", "relationship" : "Event", "relationship-detail" : "ImagineRIT 2010", "imageURL" : "Event.png", "url" : "http://www.rit.edu/imagine/"},Not a difficult process, but a time-consuming one. One that I'm not so willing to do in the future, so I decided to create a pretty simply html form that would let me enter entires. The form is simple HTML and creates a little something like this. After creating the form, I whipped up a simple CGI script in python, which has a module that makes form handling easy. Lastly, this form launches a simple script that appends entries to the contributor.js file.
This should save a lot of hassle in the future. Of course, I wasn't able to host this simple web service on my CS webspace, given the restricted permissions that disallowed me to create any sort of .htaccess file without a headache. Gives me a good opportunity to check out openshift which has been getting a lot of buzz lately.
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