Jason Braun, Bryan Hurley, Anthony Varner, Andrew Winder snewsr The gnizr social news readr

Project Description Project Idea 4: Create a Home page for gnizr community Create a new page in gnizr that will features Top links and tags. The purpose of this page is to give users an overview of that what’s going on in gnizr. You may also consider applying other virtualization and mashup techniques. For example, display geotagged bookmarks in a Google Maps, and at the same time, mashup news or bookmarks from a third-party web application (e.g., del.icio.us or Yahoo! Pipe). Things to consider: How do you compose the Web page – MVC, page-drive, mashup? How will this page be created – a robot creates it every hour or it’s created when a user request is received? What relevant information to collect from gnizr DB?

Project Goals Create a news feed to replace the normal login page that greets you when you connect to a gnizr server Create an RSS feed of the news feed so a user can keep up with the latest bookmarks without connecting to gnizr Allow posting of comments from any user to any other user’s bookmarks

Innovations Additional functionality added to gnizr Backend development directly to the gnizr database using proper gnizr methods Database driven on demand pages created specifically for this project Used MVC to display new interfaces News feed is created when requested, not by robot or other method Bookmarks and comments are retrieved from the gnizr database

System Architecture

gnizr backend hacking Database interface Comments database Stored procedures Bookmarks database Thorough understanding of gnizr attained

gnizr frontend hacking Replaced index.ftl Pom.xml Integrated with existing gnizr code Used gnizr 2.4 Created a news feed page to replace the default login when connecting to gnizr RSS feed created from news feed page Comments interface to add and change comments

Future Work Proper use of all gnizr css and other information to make the new pages fully compliant with global changes to gnizr Integration of comments into the news and RSS feed Check logged-in status to change available news feeds Add additional functionality to the news feed page so it can act more like a portal to gnizr

Lessons Learned Meet often, even if for short amounts of time SVN and Google Code are your friend, do not be afraid Comments, comments, comments, and commit comments Dr. Chen is your friend too, do not be afraid Webwork however, is not your friend, but Dr. Chen is a level 70 Webwork Mage, and he is in your guild Communication, updates, keeping everybody updated is important

Demo

Demo the new system Start in Firefox (nice RSS reader) Start the server Open the homepage See the news feed Click the subscribe link on the bottom and subscribe to the page Leave Firefox open Open IE Open the homepage See the news feed Click home to login login Create a new bookmark with a tag Go over to Firefox, open a new blank tab and refresh the live feed and show that it is working properly Back to IE and demonstrate the comments functionality Create a comment on a bookmark Back to Firefox and login through the home link on the front page Add a comment to the bookmark that you just added one to through IE to show that two different users can add comments to the same thing. All functionality has been demonstrated the thoroughly explained at this point. Open up for questions.