wclarkson/menu-alerts

An in-progress attempt at a service to automatically alert Tufts students when their favorite foods are in the dining hall.

Automated Dining Hall Menu Alerts

Last year my friend suggested that I write a program to send him a text message
whenever his favorite soup was being served in the dining hall. soup_alert.rb
is the first attempt at implementing this concept. It uses a basic regular
expression to determine which soups are being served, which is neither reliable
nor elegant.

Last April, I participated Tufts University's first annual Hackathon, and
decided it was time to turn the idea of dining hall alerts into a more
complete product. The (incomplete) results of this are found in the service
directory. The concept was a multi-part system that would allow students to
register for alerts online for only the foods they specified. This consisted
of a few components:
1)	a web interface written in PHP that allows users to sign up and stores
		their account info and food preferences in a sqlite3 database
2)	 a Ruby program to scrape the online dining hall menu and respond
		to queries with a list of matching foods for a user
3)	a Ruby program to read the sqlite3 database and interface with (2) and (4)
4)	a Ruby program to formulate and send text messages

The first step in this project was a ~3 hour detour to teach myself the basics
of PHP. Before the Hackathon, the extent of my PHP knowledge was on the level
of <?php echo "Hello World!"; ?>. I wrote a simple, generic web form to store
user-entered data in a sqlite3 database. I then moved on to writing the
collection of Ruby programs which perform most of the work.

Still unfinished:
- Implementing (1) from the list above
- An elegant solution for storing the names of all common dishes so
	users can select from a list or have choices auto-complete (to avoid
	mistyped entries preventing dish names from matching)