Awesome Board was a personal project created for use at Awesome Camp, an annual unconference held in Lincoln, NE. It was inspired by location check-in apps, like Foursquare. The process for checkin was influenced by the HelloApp.
During Awesome Camp, participants were invited to check-in to each session they attended. To do so, they sent a tweet to @awesomecamp and included the hashtag that corresponded to that room. Their name and Twitter handle was then displayed as in that session on the Awesome Board homepage. Participants could also give others badges by including that person’s user name and one of nearly 20 additional hashtags. Each participant had a profile automatically created after their first tweet to @awesomecamp. The profile showed the users most recent check-in, as well as what badges they had earned/received, and one’s they had given.
TDBC devised, designed and developed this web app from start to finish (with a lesson on PHP RegEx from @rossnelson somewhere in the middle). Twitter feeds were collected by the FeedWordpress plugin, which was modified by TDBC to parse additional data into custom fields. RegEx was used in the WordPress loop to transform hashtags into images of the badge. Conditional statements were also made possible through RegEx which controlled the placement of tweets on the homepage and individual profiles.
Awesome Camp was an excellent testing arena for the Awesome Board. TDBC plans to fix a few minor bugs and create a better mobile experience for next year’s event. The possibility also exists to transfer this technology to another project simply by rebranding the theme and swapping out badge designs.