boston-rubyists

This project lets you easily set up a super-planet that aggregates the GitHub feeds, tweets, and blogs of your local hacker community.

It was created for BostonRB (Boston Ruby Group), but it's configurable, so you can deploy a version for your own hacker community.

The tool is built with Backbone.js, so that the landing page will update itself with new information as it gets inserted into the database by background tasks. The background tasks are also provided.

Screenshot:

The demo of this site can be seen here, unless it is down.

Requires

• PostgreSQL
• Ruby 1.9
• tidy (HTML tidy) should be on your path

Setup

Install dependences:

bundle install

Configure the database connection and the data feeds in config.yml. You can copy the pattern in config.yml.example:

database: postgres:///bostonruby
page_title: boston rubyists
poll_interval: 8 
org: 
  name: bostonrb.org
  href: http://bostonrb.org
opml: http://www.blogbridge.com/rl/291/Boston+Ruby.opml
twitters: https://github.com/bostonrb/bostonrb/wiki/All-Rubyists
language: ruby
locations: 
- cambridge+ma 
- boston 
- somerville+ma 
- salem+ma 
- providence+ri 
- salem+ma 
- portsmouth+nh 
- portland+me

• opml is an OPML file that contains a list of all the blogs you want to aggregate.
• locations is a list of GitHub search "location" filters.
• language is a programming language filter to use for the GitHub users search.
• poll_interval is the interval in seconds at which the Backbone.js client code should poll the Sinatra app for updates. Sorry, no websockets yet.
• twitters is a URL of a page that contains a list of Twitter user URLs

Set up the database you configured in config.yml like this, substituting the right name for your database.

createdb bostonruby
psql bostonruby < schema.psql

Populating the database

There are four rake tasks you should run to populate the data:

rake hackers
rake updates
rake blogs
rake tweets

Run rake hackers first to populate the hackers table in the database.

The other three tasks should be run periodically to keep the content up to date. Use cron or some other tool.

Running the webapp

rackup

Contribute

Please feel free to fork and enhance.

If you want to use this for another set of hackers and bloggers, please do and please drop me a line to let me know you're using this tool!

Authors

• Daniel Choi github twitter