My First Rails site is Live
Feb 29, 2008 in Ruby, Web Development
So I finally finished it after months of laboring and coding away, HeelsHousing.com is live! The site is geared towards UNC - Chapel Hill students looking for housing opportunities close to campus. It does this by auto-calculating a properties distance from “The Pit” (think of this as the center of campus for those of you that don’t know UNC). The calculation is done “as the crow flies” and thus can be manually overridden by administrators if they wish to use a distance based on road directions. The reason for this is that obtaining driving directions distance via Google Maps server side is essentially impossible, but calculating the distance between two points on the planet is just a few calculations away (via the Rails Geokit plugin). It then allows you to sort search results by Distance from the Pit.
Another one of the sites great features is it’s overall integration with Google Maps. You’ll find on every property page a map of where the property is. Also a little javascript pop-up box (not window) with the map will be displayed if you click the “Map It!” link in the search results.
And just to put the proverbial whip-cream on the sundae, If a property owner or administrator specifies that a property is close to certain Chapel Hill bus routes, those routes are overlaid on top of the map.
The Daily Tarheel, who commissioned this site from us, run the day to day operations of it. This includes adding and updating current properties, but also selling property listings to local property owners. They can specify 2 levels of paid owner user accounts with different levels of permissions. The owners can then specify different types of units for each property, and upload unit floorplans as well as property pictures and a video.
In my next post I’ll go over some of the back-end features used to create and host the site.