Hovercards: display complementary information while saving space within your website

By On February 28, 2012 · 4 Comments

For those of you who aren’t familiar with hovercards, it is a term used to describe additional content that is dynamically shown when moving your mouse over specific content on a webpage. The typical content of a hovercard is text, like a user name, or an image, like a profile avatar. The new content displayed is typically in a box or “card” (hence the card in hovercard) that is displayed in the foreground of the webpage (hence the hover in hovercard).

A more familiar example of existing hovercards would be those fancy semi-popup boxes that facebook, twitter, and many other websites are using to show user information when you mouse over a users avatar or username.

Well, we here at Tutor With Me recently started adding hovercards to our website and would like to share some of our experiences.

Our primary intention was to use hovercards as a means to display a sizable amount of [...]

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elasticsearch and YOU! (aka implementing your own onsite search)

By On February 14, 2012 · Leave a Comment

A self contained search engine can be beneficial for websites with lots of dynamic and/or user generated content. A good case for implementing your own search engine is for e-commerce or social websites which need additional search functionality on top of regular keyword searches (where something like Google Custom Search falls short). One of the solutions for this problem is elasticsearch.

elasticsearch is a pretty amazing open source search engine built to be fast, reliable, and above all easy to setup and maintain. It’s built on top of Apache Lucene and basically provides extra functionality and and a higher level API. We recently switched from Solr (via sunspot), which was also based on Lucene, because its implementation was much more straightforward and we are pretty satisfied with the decision.

Don’t get me wrong though, there wasn’t anything in particular wrong with Solr (or sunspot) as they are also very [...]

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Friends & Family Launch Party: A Success

By On January 9, 2012 · 2 Comments

Even though it was our intention to update our blog regularly, we’ve managed to go quiet for some months now… All with good reason of course! Our team has been working very hard for months now to prepare for what took place on January 6th - Tutor With Me’s Launch Party to friends & family.

Preparing for the Launch Party was no easy feat. Although the organization and logistics for the event were easy enough to put together, the difficulty lied in getting the product in a ready state to demonstrate during the event. When we originally conceived the idea of having a Launch Party back in November, we estimated that we would have ample time to complete the programming requirements for the demo, but of course, not everything goes as planned… A good two weeks before January 6th, we had a half-functioning online classroom environment, no styling on most pages and a lot of glitchy functionality. [...]

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How to customize JSON output

By On September 14, 2011 · Leave a Comment

Rails makes it really easy to create XML and JSON endpoints to your application: just add a respond_to block and voilà, you have data publicly accessible via a GET request which you can use for your application. One must tread carefully however as you might be exposing data that you don’t want bots (or people) to crawl and use your data in malicious ways. Read on to see how you can contain the data you don’t want to expose.

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the ‘ins’ & ‘outs’ of an industry

By On July 25, 2011 · Leave a Comment

Like last week’s post, this one will NOT focus on product development. With every start-up company it is critical to assess the full potential of an Industry. Many new businesses have failed to realize the importance of understanding the industry that they will be competing in. Ultimately, those businesses have struggled and failed within the first few months of operation.

By researching and studying endless industry statistics and trends, one can realize if the industry is growing or whether it is stagnant. This can save someone both time and money in the long run. Typically, if the industry is in a growth phase, you want to jump on the ‘band wagon’ as soon as you can. If you wait too long, someone else may beat you to the punch.

When researching a specific industry, you really want to look at what drives the industry. This will really help you focus your product and capture a small part [...]

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