Path Finder-9

Web is a great ideas playground. This is the last week for the submission of Presentations for FOSS4G 2009 (http://2009.foss4g.org/presentations). So far we have had a great set of workshops and tutorials submitted. Mark Leslie (FOSS4G 2009 Workshops Chairman) did a fantastic job coordinating the call, receipt and collation of workshops and tutorials as well as managing the voting process (Checkout Mark’s post about the workshops/tutorials). This has resulted in an impressive line up of expert instructors and tutorials on cutting edge and relevant topics.

This information was provided in a document to me by Mark. For the FOSS4G 2009 conference we want this information as widely shared as possible.

So the first thing I did was to take the information that Mark give us and converted it into a YAML format. This meant coming up with a simple data model for the data.
I did this by creating the a file for events called schedule.yml and one for presenters: http://2009.foss4g.org/schedule.yml and http://2009.foss4g.org/presenters.yml.

They both reference each other. After some trial and error I came up with something that gave us a good description of the event, authors/presenters and time of event. It had to be intuitive and easy to parse:


Next I want to demonstrate how easy it is to create build something useful from these YAML file. Well I am an iPhone owner and also enjoy developing in ruby.

Path Finder

Enter Sinatra: My first thought was to build an iPhone website where people can browse the FOSS4G 2009 – and it stuck. I decided to use Sinatra an elegant, lightweight ruby web framework. The site is up and running at http://foss4g2009.heroku.com You can get the code using git from git@heroku.com:foss4g2009.git

In the next few posts I’ll walk through and show you how I built this site using sinatra + iui and used heroku to deploy it. The site currently features:

  • Browse workshops & tutorials
  • Share ical event file of an event via email
  • Download ical event file of an event via web

Hope it will encourage others to hack around with this data or suggest ideas for building something interesting for the FOSS4G 2009 conference.