John Beynon

Website launched to bring together the Guildford web community

We’ve launched a new website for Web Meet Guildford, aka WMG today, webmeetguildford.co.uk to serve as a directory of anyone involved with the web in and around Guildford and also for notifying the community of future events that we will be holding.

Built using the tool we love, Ruby on Rails we’ve incorporated sign up via Devise and Omniauth for Twitter authentication and the Twitter gem for retrieving Tweets. Agencies signing up are geocoded from their postcode using the Google Geocoding service, the rest of their details are then populated by magic.

The site is delivered via Heroku using a range of addons from New Relic for server and front end performance monitoring, Hoptoad, Logging to Memcached thrown in for good measure.

WMG Screenshot

Working with the Twitter API can certainly be fun, for instance did you know that a Twitter user has two unique identifiers? Their REST API uses one of these IDs and the search API uses another, it’s been an ‘accepted’ issue now since December 2008! Also, dealing with hash tags has it’s own pit falls since they are a free for all. The #WMG tag we use is used elsewhere so we simply can’t just show any tweet using the hashtag #wmg so we have to make sure that we only show #wmg tweets from our members.

We plan on adding additional functionality in coming months – so if you’re involved with the web in and around Guildford make sure you come and join to keep up to date with the goings on and hopefully we’ll see you at the next event confirmed now for June 23rd from 6pm (3 Pigeons, top of Guildford high street) and let us know if you’ve got any ideas on how we can further develop the site.

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Tags: event, guildford, surrey, beer, launch, wmg