#simpleweb

Connect404 - Simpleweb Rusic Hacknight

Last night was another superb Simpleweb hacknight - this time we were hacking away with their social platform Rusic.

What is Rusic?

Rusic is an insanely powerful and flexible web platform for creating socially-powered web apps - complete with social login, voting system, data storage, CRUD, theming, CDN asset hosting and deployment. 

It also uses Shopify’s Liquid templating language and has a superb API so it is both simple and flexible - suffice to say there is little you cannot build with it!

The brief for the hack was pretty open - simply to leverage Rusic in whatever way you could think of.

Our idea

I joined forces with the excellent David Darnes and Rob Rhoades (who, incidentally, was Simpleweb’s first remote hacker!) to build our idea: Connect404.

We wanted to make a 404 Rusic theme that you could have your website redirect to if/when someone encountered a missing page on your website.

The 404 page would then collect the referring URL that led to the missing page and log this 'error' in Rusic, thus turning it into an error log.

Meanwhile, to incentivise the user to submit an error report and make the page more fun/interesting, we decided to create a web version of Connect4.

After logging in via Twitter/Facebook, you can then pick a column to place your token and try to ‘connect 4′. As an added bonus, your social profile avatar and link were added to each token you placed.

We had hoped to implement red/yellow turn taking, real-time updates and animated tokens dropping in, and detecting a win but 3 hours was too tight :)

Behind the scenes, the tokens were essentially just a uniquely styled list view of 'ideas', stacked using flexbox.

You can see a demo of how far we got at connect404.rusic.com, which we were chuffed won us 3rd prize of £40! :)

The competition

There was an amazing turn out and so many innovative uses of Rusic, really highlighting just how powerful and flexible it is.

1st prize went to an awesome automated iOS app builder build in Python, 2nd went to an app that generated music from text - and Adam even began building a Dropbox clone!

Thanks

In closing, just wanted to say a big thank you to Simpleweb and the gang - they really know how to host a hacknight: free beer, soft drinks, snacks and delicious dinner courtesy of George. 

Also, thanks especially to Ben Reid for providing support for Rusic (and dev in general) throughout the evening.