Fodabo

Hey!  Let’s do some introductions. My name is Jeff Carpenter, I’m a sophomore majoring in Social Informatics. Fodabo was my final project for Web Programming (CS297) last Fall. Bogo Giertler, a Computer Science major and a good friend of mine, just recently joined me in developing the site. Bogo’s voluminous knowledge of web languages is going to rocket Fodabo to the next level. Let’s take a look at that next level.

So Hello, you’re reading the Fodabo blog. In this post we’re going to tell you what Fodabo will look like a week, a month, and a semester from now. Then we’ll ask you to try Fodabo out for yourself, and if you feel like it - let us know what you think.

One Week

In the span of a week, Fodabo in all its entirety will be launched out into the Colby social sphere. For better or worse, Fodabo will be chewed - and hopefully not spit out - by hundreds of new people, giving us our first good look at how well (or poorly) Fodabo works. The Fodabo you’ll be using in one week will be different from the current Fodabo in one main way:

Facebook Connect

There will be no Fodabo accounts. Everybody hates having to make a separate account for every single website they visit, so we simplified it. Since practically everybody at Colby has a Facebook account, all you’ll have to do to use Fodabo is sign in with your Facebook and you’re set.

One Month

In one month, we plan to have Fodabo completely airborne and implement some big improvements to its usability. These will include:

Join Somebody

Fodabo is all about getting together with your friends. When you see that one of your friends is going to a certain dining hall, you want to join them. Normally, to show that you’re joining them, you’d just Fodabo on your own and indicate the same time as them. With this new feature, if you click on a person’s name, you’ll be able to add your name to their update box.

Sorting

Sorting is the first of two readability improvements. Sorting will be a very simple way of organizing updates. By default, all Fodabos are ordered from most recent to least recent. With sorting options, you’ll be able to order Fodabos based on the time people specified, alphabetically by name, by meal, or by dining hall.

Friend lists

Friend lists is the second of our readability improvements. We understand that sometimes there are too many Fodabos to look through, and you really couldn’t care less where Harold Poopypants was going to lunch. Since you’ll be bringing your Facebook information along with you while using Fodabo, we can easily make it so that only the friends you choose will show up on Fodabo. This also lends itself greatly to privacy improvements. If you don’t want certain people seeing what dining hall you’re going to, we will have privacy settings to cater to your reclusive needs.

One Semester

Of course, there’s no way to tell whether 5 or 500 people will be using Fodabo by the end of the semester. It’s all up to Fodabo’s ability to handle Colby students’ needs efficiently and satisfyingly. By May, we plan to re-work the entire code of Fodabo and implement an API so we can write apps for all popular mobile devices.

Fodabo is Neat

What can we tell you? Bogo and I are going to work as hard as we can to make Fodabo the most useful tool possible. And you can agree or disagree with us by trying out Fodabo for yourself.

All you have to do is go to Fodabo.com next week and sign in with your Facebook account.

If you have any feedback at all, please don’t hesitate even for a nanosecond. You can use the Fodabo Idea Vaccuum to contact us directly.

Fodabo has been officially released to the Colby community!

It’s been 3 days since Fodabo was made public and we’ve had 7 new members and 14 Fodabos, which means each member has Fodabo’d twice as of now.

There has been no publicity about Fodabo; right now we’re operating in “private beta” mode, even though anybody is free (and welcome) to sign up.

The biggest driving factor to come to Fodabo seems to be the menus (click Fodabo’s logo). Fodabo makes the dining hall decision process a hundred times easier. You can view the dining hall menus and see where your friends are going all in the same place.

To the first 7 brave Fodaboers, thank you so much. Please contact me without hesitation if something goes wrong or you have an idea.

Sometimes it seems that you can’t turn a corner without the administration trying to regulate your behavior. Fodabo knows this. Fodabo understands your pain. Fodabo is students.

Fodabo does not touch any part the Colby administration; it is completely student-run. Fodabo believes that the social parts of being a student should be kept within the student body’s grasp. You and your friends should communicate on your own terms, using your own tools.

If you ask a question, we will answer it here.

Where did yesterday’s Fodabos go?

Fodabo will only display updates from today. This makes Fodabo much simpler to use and understand. Integrating an archive system would be overkill; most people don’t care where Fester Bestertester went to lunch 47 days ago.

Why are the dining hall menus poorly formatted?

Fodabo gets the dining hall menus through RSS feeds on the Colby website. Their RSS is inconsistently pre-formatted, so Fodabo removes all of the formatting, leaving it as plain text.

I only look at things that are shiny and pretty.

First, that’s not a question. Second, if you want Fodabo to look its sharpest you may want to use Apple’s Safari for now until we get Fodabo looking nice in all browsers.

Do you have a question or an idea for Fodabo?

Use the Fodabo Idea Vacuum to get it out. We’d really appreciate it.