Jul 08Tweet, Tweet, Vote: www.divvoted.com

• By Dan Griffey in News,

Hey. Have you heard of Twitter?

Twitter is a *massive* microblogging service that let’s you post updates of 140 characters from web, SMS or IM. There are loads of creative uses of Twitter (a plant that tweets when it needs watering !) and here’s a new one.

www.divvoted.com

Designed and developed in less than 4 days by the team here at OC Vision, DivVoted.com is one of those great in-house projects that let’s you really flex the development muscle. We needed a site that was agile and quick to build, scalable (hey, it could get busy) and cheap to run. We knew that with our range of skills we could deliver all of this (and a great design, thanks Wez) in a short time while still keeping the client projects running.

DivVoted.com is:

• Built on Ruby on Rails, a great agile framework that lets you build dynamic websites quickly. We have been learning this for a while, and are getting pretty good at creating funky sites.
• Talking to the Twitter API. API’s let you talk to other websites to get data. The Twitter API is a way of our site reading timelines, sending messages and storing ‘Tweets’. We have to do this in a clever way using a queue so as not to overload Twitter.
• Using a database. For this project we chose MySQL – had to keep the costs in check.
• Hosted on MediaTemple. Media Temple have a great ‘Grid’ of servers, which allow our sites to run efficiently at a low cost, and scale to meet demand.
• Using ‘Cloud’ services. We use cloud computing services from Amazon AWS to grab the thumbnails and store some images. This saves us resource and therefore cost.
• Using jQuery, neat Javascript framework with some great effects (try hiding the island).
• … and finally. Built by the talented and brilliant people of OC Vision.

So why not show your favourite sites some love; DivVoted is great for showing off your latest designs, or checking out other peoples votes for inspiration.