I today completed a twelve-day stint working with Westfield London in collaboration with Delete London, working on Ruby on Rails development.

The very lovely digital marketing team had some ideas for quick wins to improve the user experience on the London Westfield website, including adding affiliate product data to the retailer pages, and creating an events booking system. I was brought in to help realise these ideas, and turned around two rapid solutions in the allotted time.
Affiliates
The challenge was to find a way to manage the variety of retailer and affiliate partners that Westfield deal with, in an efficient way. I developed an XML parser using REXML’s stream listener to read XML information from an arbitrary affiliate partner, and create product objects from the live stream. These objects then interface with the existing CMS system and generate XML documents ready to be picked-up in the view. Not only does this vastly improve the look of the retailer pages and raise the profile of their clients, but their click-throughs will earn affiliate fees. Win!
Events
Responding to a very tight deadline, I developed an events booking system, designed for the digital marketing team to administer events with minimal effort. The system, implemented in two days, has an administrative back-end that allows the creation of events, with multiple dates attached, composed in an AJAX-form. I used unobtrusive_date_picker to render a user-friendly date picker, as well as restful_authentication to handle the login process. In order to launch within the timeframe, we decided to build the system as a stand-alone webapp, which was supposed to be hosted on a third-party, but after an eleventh-hour issue, I ended up offering my own server as a host, and therefore have my first corporate client! However, the rendered form sits within an IFRAME to hide the URL from the customer.

Meanwhile, hundreds are signing up to Westfield’s events, and the marketing team can download their required CSV data on demand, and the form will deactivate once individual dates become full.

If you’re into fashion, you should sign-up! http://uk.westfield.com/london/offers-events/events/william-baker-booking

Two months ago, Indymedia London launched a new version of an alternative London-centered news website using Ruby on Rails and Debian/GNU Linux. After several months of indecision about what system to use for content management; whether to continue development of an existing Java-servlet application, to use Drupal or to develop something new, the London-based collective have arrived at a topical activist news website that has successfully been adopted by the activist community, and is fresher and richer in content than ever before.

The system, called Hyperactive, is a rails application that embodies the strongest recent trends in web development. It make extensive use of RSS to syndicate content, including videos and comments a la YouTube and is soon to include mapping from OpenStreetMap on its events section. It has also been adopted by a Danish IMC, and looks set to become more established in the wider network.

It is a triumph of the open-source software development model, based entirely on free-software, and developed without traditional planning constraints or limitations. It is particularly pleasing that Indymedia bring their own non-hierarchical ideals to the process; a group of individuals from different backgrounds and countries are contributing to the codebase, although the group have never all been together in the same space, nor is there an appointed manager or team leader.

I’m glad to say I have been making my first commits to the codebase recently, contributing a ‘featured groups’ section to the bottom of the homepage. Starting from an idea over beers in a South-London pub, the feature was coded on the spot and turned around in less than a couple of weeks. In essence, the available open-source technology, from operating systems to IDEs to version control make it possible for part-time energy to result in professional and fresh websites.

The project demonstrates quite clearly what is possible, when a small number of unpaid developers achieve functionality not far behind huge corporate websites. Behind them are even more volunteers contributing to moderation, testing and promotion.

Yet the problems of under-capitalisation and lack of resources are still present. The huge corporations, with their advertising revenue and share capital have the advantage of huge bandwidth and hardware redundancy, while many of the alternative websites rely on donations and a dedicated following. The dilemma as developers is how continue innovating with open-source software whenever it falls behind the latest products from the software giants; for the open-source developer, nurturing new projects by utilising and contributing to them can sometimes mean offering an uncompetitive product, and in the field of news and politics there are huge resources available to the mainstream media.

But for the sake of a few hours work here and there, when you can see the difference made by your efforts; when it is fun to work on an open-source project, its hard to see the open-source and voluntary sources of energy ever drying up.

If you are interested in contributing to the development of the project, have a look at escapegoats project website.