We are a product of our experiences. Increasingly, we deposit digital traces of those experiences around the web (e.g., Twitter, Gowalla, GitHub, Last.fm, etc.) and on our various computing devices. Together, these deposits form a rich archeological history. Stratify gathers (excavates, if you will) that data from those disparate sources and provides a consolidated timeline of your experiences.
Stratify allows you to configure collectors for the data sources from which you want to pull in your activities. Stratify currently provides collectors for:
- Gowalla
- Instapaper
- Rhapsody
- iTunes
Once you've decided which collectors you want to use, Stratify goes to work building a consolidated history for you. And then, when you add a new tweet or check in at your favorite coffee shop (for example), Stratify sees those new activities and automatically adds them to your history.
Stratify is a Rails app, but most of the core logic (i.e., all of the data collection logic) is just Ruby. Stratify uses Rails to provide the (currently very vanilla) UI for displaying the activity timeline. I hope to eventually provide a more rich user interface experience.
"I am sharing my code. I am not launching an open source project." -- Alan Gutierrez
http://kiloblog.com/post/sharing-code-for-what-its-worth
Stratify is developed and tested with the following dependencies.
- Ruby 1.9.2
- MongoDB 1.8
To use Stratify, clone the repo, cd into the root directory, and ...
gem install bundler
bundle
cp config/mongoid.example.yml config/mongoid.yml
rails server -e production
Now that you have the Rails app running, it's time to configure some collectors.
The collectors run via a Rake task (conveniently named collectors:run). To set up your desired collectors, first make a copy of the example rake task.
cp lib/tasks/collectors.example.rake lib/tasks/collectors.rake
Then, open lib/tasks/collectors.rake in your favorite editor and configure your desired collectors.
Once you've updated collectors.rake, you're ready to start pulling data into your timeline.
`RAILS_ENV=production rake collectors:run`
After the rake task completes, head back to the UI, and you should see your latest activities in your timeline.
Now you're ready to set up your collectors to run automatically. Stratify runs the collectors via cron using the whenever gem. By default, the cron job will execute the collectors:run task every two hours. You can change these settings in config/schedule.rb.
To install the cron job ...
# cd to the Stratify root directory and ...
whenever --update-crontab
crontab -l # show updated crontab
TODO - Add easy mechanism for loading example data
- UI for users to configure collectors
- Rake task for loading sample data (currently handled via db/samples.rb)
- More collectors (e.g., GitHub, Garmin, etc.)
- Pagination (or appropriate mechanism for navigating historical data)
- UI design
- Better error notification in collectors
- Plugin model for collectors (including extracting existing collectors into plugins)
- Ability to search for activities
- Statistical analysis (e.g., trends)
If you find yourself hacking on Stratify, get your TDD on with Spork an Watchr. Spork rocks. Watchr rocks. Behold!
Open a terminal window and start a Spork instance for RSpec and Cucumber:
# The RSpec and Cucumber versions of spork use different ports,
# so there’s no problem running them together. Just run one as a
# background process.
bundle exec spork cucumber & bundle exec spork
Open a second terminal window and fire up Watchr:
bundle exec watchr specs.watchr
Enjoy sweet, speedy BDD/TDD bliss.
Copyright 2011 Jason Rudolph (jasonrudolph.com). Released under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for further details.