The Week of February 26
A brief check-in of the ongoing development of Blundit, the world’s only expert accuracy tracker.
Some weeks you don’t feel like you’re getting enough done, and some weeks you feel like a productivity machine. And last week was the latter! I got a lot done, and here’s going to be an actually brief look at the main feature upgrades.
The Homepage
At the beginning of last week, the Blundit homepage was barely an empty field, with only the header, footer, and placeholder “Welcome to the site, bro” text. Today, though? It’s got so much! It looks just like the mockup now.
See?
It’s got:
- Universal search bar at the top
- Three most recent claims, predictions and experts
- Cool filters to show open and settled claims and predictions, and best/worst experts
- A slightly interactive listing of the most popular claims, predictions and experts on the site (based on number of comments in the past week, though it’s presently set to show all-time popular)
- Cute Fontawesome-powered preloading animations
All of this is super-exciting to me, because it looks like the mockup, and it has some nice features. Also, the filters working means the elaborate client-side caching system I built (and will one day write a very long post about) works. Yay for functionality!
Searching in Index Pages
As I said in the last section, I added a universal search bar to the top of the site. The version on the homepage just redirects to a not-finished Search page (which will eventually trigger the search automatically, so it’ll look like it works), but I put it on the Claim, Prediction and Expert index pages (eg, http://dev.blundit.com/experts), and it can’t bounce the user back to the search page, because that would be ridiculous. It needs to show results in the appropriate index page. So!
It does that now. I built a little InsideSearch ReactJS component, which triggers a search call, and the content gets updated. Here’s what it looks like if you search for experts named Paul:
Hi Pauls!
The search implementation across the site is quite rudimentary at present, as you can just type in what you’re looking for; there’s no “advanced options” or anything, though, since this is just the functionality for v0.2. In the future I’ll enable sorting in different ways, and filtering by categories. But it works now and working works for me!
What’s Next?
This week I’m aiming to finish the Search page, the User profile page and, if I have enough time, re-enable the Bookmarks section (which, like caching, will be explained in a looooooong post at some point). I’m excited!
If you want to follow along with what I’m doing in real-time, you can check out the project Github repos, and look at our public Trello board (we’re currently in the “Pre-Alpha v0.2 — CURRENT” column).
