Online discussion and dating with a difference, integrating profiles from around the web
www.onlyconnect.me
After several years of focussing on making the event more inviting for families, Greenbelt recognised that it was also time to recognise the many single people who make up the festival's audience. One of the festival's key features is the way people identify strongly with it and opportunities to connect with other festivalgoers (or those who share its ethos) are always popular, so it was decided to build an online space that may be for dating, or may just be for a good chat.
Working with project manager Phil Smith and designer Wilf Whitty (Ratio Type) we built the site from scratch as a Ruby on Rails application, including taking photoshop concepts and turning it into semantic HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We extended the popular ActiveMerchant library to handle subscription payments through PayPoint, integrated the Sphinx search engine to help people find the discussions they're interested in, set up the hosting over at Slicehost, and set up a quick wordpress blog (talking to the same user database as the rails app) to help Only Connect talk about itself and provide a few tutorials.
Not wanting to reinvent the wheel we've designed the site to be a good citizen of the web. It pulls in statuses from twitter and facebook, photos from flickr, and listening habits from last.fm, and supplements them all with metadata provided by Amazon through their many APIs. Of course for those who'd rather do it all in one place, there are backup systems so you can upload a few photos and tell us about your interests directly.
As with any good web project, Only Connect's already evolving. In the first couple of weeks since launch we've made some rapid revisions to respond to the first user feedback, and new features such as tools to help with offline social events are being lined up.