VoteMate, which is now my new IDS, is something that I had been working on for quite awhile before school started this year. Primarily, I’d set up the basic system that it would run off of, a re-purposed infrastructure and collection of code files I’d created for FindALostPet (actually, a lot of this code dates back to VoteVancouver, and even before that, to RWTweb). By now, I’ve gotten tired of copying this code and taking out the bits that make it FindALostPet, whenever I want to set up a new website, so I created something I nicknamed Foundations; It’s just a folder that I copy and rename to whatever I want my next project to be called.

I’d created a lot of the look and feel as well, and added a few features on top, though nothing that special. Here’s what it looked like at about the time I started time-tracking for the IDS:

The homepage hasn’t changed much since, and pretty much all that has changed has been below the fold-line.

I’d also gotten a source for some of the data I would need: Ridings. Interestingly enough, it’s difficult to come across a good list of all the ridings in British Columbia, at least an up-to-date one with all the proper formatting and nicely organised so that a computer can get at the data quickly. Fortunately, I already knew about OpenNorth’s Represent API from earlier work, so this was made incredibly easy.

The great thing about Represent is that I can give it a postal code and it can return the riding that postal code is in for the next BC election (the ridings have changed since the last election). This makes the sign up process really really easy for users: All they have to do is enter their postal code and it tells them their riding, instead of having to ask them for their riding straight off the bat as I would have had to do otherwise. (I get excited about little things.)

Oh, and that’s what powers this, as seen on mobile:

Once you’ve signed up and confirmed your riding, you’re given your first look at the home stream.

I’m not sure if I created this before or after IDS start, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter. It’s gotten a lot better since then:

Notice the super-fancy list of candidates in my riding. That’s thanks to a nice CBC page someone on Jelly found me: This one. It’s a constantly updated table of candidates as they’re announced, and is really useful for filling in my own data set.

(By the way, for those of you who are also obsessed with small things, I’ve found a really nice piece of software for entering data into my MySQL database quickly: It’s called HeidiSQL. I know, really exciting isn’t it.)

And, for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on creating a sign up process for candidates, so that a candidate or authorised campaign agent can sign up and modify their candidate profile. This is quite tricky, because I have to find some way to be 100% sure that the user is actually authorised to modify the profile and represent the candidate. I’ll have a post on that shortly.