RideBoard – making the world a little greener
A few years back, my team was approached by a group from our student government who had a problem. Before a renovation in our campus center, there was one of the classic staples of colleges back in the day – the ride board.
If you had an extra seat or needed a ride somewhere, you could post a note and hopefully meet up and share the expenses and pass the time.
Post renovation, the rideboard was gone, and they missed it. So, we came up with the idea to do an online version. Using PHP, the Google Maps API and a bit of RSS, I think we came up with a pretty good solution. The bulk of the coding on this was done by students working for me at the time.
If you click on that image, you’ll get a larger version where you can see the detail a little better. Since the site is limited to on-campus IP addresses, you can’t see the real thing.
Once you click on a pushpin, you’re taken to a detail page of that city, and the rides needed and being offered to that place. Signing up is simple – just a few fields of information are asked, since we know only students of our college will be using this page. The student gets an email right away with a link and code to approve their listing, and once they do it’s live. The code also works if they need to amend their listing, such as the number of seats available. Honestly, I haven’t had to touch this app in a long time since it’s coded to take care of itself.
Is anyone interested in the code for use on their campuses? I think we could open source it if a few people are interested. It would be our little attempt to be a bit greener. Let me know what you think.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
That’s a real neat idea. I’ll share your call for interested parties in my next HEE/CWE newsletters.