/dash

a customized homepage of news and events

Primary LanguageJavaScript

Dash - a customized homepage of news and events

http://dashapp.herokuapp.com

This app relies on the WordNet corpora of NLTK, which cannot be installed non-locally: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/nltk-users/D_nvJG8n4gM

Things that are wrong:

  • CSS orders items incorrectly in columns; should use horizontal box layout
  • News/Event icons do not appear on item corners (CSS display issue)
  • Django/Python/Heroku do not play well with unicode text

Things that work but need fixing:

  • Not built for speed/efficiency; querying of content APIs occurs on every page load
  • No 404/500 pages; debug is on
  • No validation/parameterization of user interests
  • Links to external sites; originally used Readability and on-site lightboxes, but API was blocked

Things that could be better:

  • Error checking is almost nonexistent; hasn't been stress tested
  • URL patterns could have been organized better
  • User interest sets are stored as single UserProfile fields; should be ManyToMany with users
  • Creates a custom UserProfile instead of a custom User model (not supported in Django 1.5)

...not an exhaustive list!