Followers of this blog will know that I’m a devoted (I go to the pub EVERY week) Alumni member of the Edinburgh University Cycling Club. At the last AGM I took on the role of webmaster. And did nothing. Until yesterday!
The Brief
- A simple design that gets information across in a clear manner.
- A gallery to show people rides and social events.
- Easy maintenance.
Preparation
The reason it took me so long to get round to building a site, was that Edinburgh University Computing Services weren’t willing to give me a MySQL database, so that ruled out Wordpress.
What’s up so far?
Yesterday I made a simple un-styled page to display all the information regarding upcoming events (especially Freshers Week) and regular rides.
I then styled this with a very basic style, which quickly grew into something a little more advanced. It even has my favourite style of navigation and orientation; tabs!
At the moment there is no login for updating content, mostly due to the lack of a database. I hope to solve this by building a Rails REST app running on my own servers, queried by PHP when edits are in progress.
The Gallery
Once I had the basic style done, the next thing people were asking for was a gallery. Instead of uploading images to the University servers, I decided to make use of Flickr and their APIs to power the gallery.
The advantages of this are obvious:
- Many of our members already have a Flickr account with lots of club photos in.
- Flickr already has a mature and advanced photo administration interface.
- Everyone can add photos!
So a Flickr Group and a quick bit of PHP to query the API had it up and running!
A bit more PHP added paginations and a few other niceties. This was the first time I had done any PHP in a few months, but despite this, the only real issue I had was remembering to put semi-colons at the end of every line.
Obviously, this was a good time for Flickr to have an rare outage. Nothing to do with me.
So there you go, head over and check it out.
