I’ve been asked a several times how I built IowaFlood.com and how it was done in 2 hours. Even though this is my business, I will share the secrets with you – because we are about education first here at 48Web.
Platform: WordPress
We are, self-admittedly, WordPress ninjas here at 48Web. Most of the projects we work on use it as a platform – proving it is not just a blogging tool. WordPress is the CMS / blog platform that powers the IowaFlood.com website. It gets auto updated from RSS feeds from Google, National Weather Service, Yahoo! Pipes, and others. Most of the main content (ie Videos and Pictures) are manually blogged by me. And we used a popular WordPress theme, called Morning After – which by this time has been heavily customized by me.
Engine: Yahoo! Pipes
I have used Yahoo! Pipes for many projects and there was no where else to look when the need came up. Pipes are doing two things for IowaFlood.com. First off I am using it to search, parse, and aggregate multiple news sources for posting to the website. Secondly, it provides the “Social Media Firehouse” widget you see on the top right that aggregates information from Flickr, YouTube and other sources based on a context I provide it.
Aggregator: Custom
The aggregator portion is some software I wrote that powers a number of websites, including IowaBlogs.net and centraliowabloggers.com. Basically it takes the output of Yahoo! Pipes and auto posts it to WordPress via an API wrapper I wrote to the XML-RPC API built into WordPress. This runs on a timed basis which is how the website is fed a lot of content.
Social: Twitter
The social tool of choice was obvious – Twitter. With the local #dmtweetup Twitter community in Des Moines I knew it would be easy to mobilize. In order to effectively aggregate the tweets into the system I asked everyone discussing the flood to use a hashtag – #IowaFlood. Using Twemes.com I created a hashtag widget that you see on the front page of IowaFlood.com.
Contributions: Many tools
In order to make it easy for as many people to contribute as possible I used a few things. First I set up a form at WuFoo so people could share their stories and upload pictures for me to post on the website. Secondly, I allow people to setup their own account on WordPress using the “Contributor” role so they can post content themselves. I asked that people upload pictures to Flickr using the tag #IowaFlood. Then, a Flickr group was created as well to organize the photos. I used Meebo to create an embeddable chat room for real time discussions. People also started using Twitter to communicate many messages to me, such as alerts and places needing sandbag help, for me to post on the website. And last I set up an email address for people who wanted to forward pictures to me (iowaflood[at]gmail.com). And last, we are using PayPal for donations that will go to the United Way of Central Iowa.
I think that’s about it… If you have any questions, leave a comment.
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