vincentngo/colloki

Grad school research project to engage residents of local communities in meaningful conversations online

##Colloki

Colloki is an online platform to encourage meaningful conversations among residents of local communities. This particular instance of Colloki focusses on Blacksburg, Montgomery County and nearby communities.

Colloki is an opensource research project being developed at the SocialComp Group at the Center for Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Communication Studies at Virginia Tech.

Installation

• Create config/database.yml from config/database.yml.tmpl

• Create config/config.yml from config/config.yml.tmpl. For creating the permanent access key for Facebook, follow these steps: (http://liquid9.tv/blog/2011/may/12/obtaining-permanent-facebook-oauth-access-token/)

• Create config/initializers/setup_mail.rb from config/initializers/setup_mail.rb.tmpl

• Currently, ruby 1.9.2 is supported. Installing RVM is recommended (http://beginrescueend.com/): rvm install 1.9.2

• If you are using RVM, create .rvmrc in the root of the project folder. The content of this file should look something like: rvm use 1.9.2

• Install the required gems: bundle install

• The nokogiri gem may have dependencies you will need to install. Macports is recommended for installing the libxml2 and libxslt packages.

• You will also need to install imagemagick for paperclip (if not installed). You can use homebrew: brew install imagemagick

• You will also need to create and make /public/system/images writable: mkdir -p public/system/images; chmod +wx public/system/images

• rake db:migrate

• Optional: Create and configure fetch.sh from fetch.sh.tmpl if you want to use the convinient script to fetch articles for the day. Suitable for calling via cron

Deployment

We recommend deploying using Apache+Passenger:

• Setting up Passenger and deploying app: (http://www.modrails.com/install.html) (Follow steps 1 and 2)

• Deploying to sub URI on Apache: (http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide%20Apache.html#deploying_rails_to_sub_uri)

• Resources break if you deploy on a sub URI, how to fix that: (http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide%20Apache.html#sub_uri_deployment_uri_fix)

##Fun stuff

• Run rake fetch[start_date, end_date] to fetch articles for a range of dates. Both start_date and end_date are optional arguments. By default (with no arguments), rake fetch fetches the new articles for the day

• Configure lib/colloki_mining_store.rb and lib/tasks/fetch.rake for other sources. Currently not very suited to run for other data sources. Will fix in the future