PickupConnect

PickupConnect is a web app to automatically call people who are important to you. Just create an account, type in your friends/family and their phone numbers, and pickupconnect will call you and them randomly or on a schedule that you specify.

PickupConnect was created at the Boston Startup Weekend Oct. 15-16, 2011.

To install this app (assuming you are on Mac or Linux):

$ curl -O http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py
$ python distribute_setup.py

Or if you have easy_install on your machine (don't do this if you did the above):

$ sudo easy_install pip

Then create the virtualenv:

$ sudo pip install virtualenv
$ virtualenv pickupconnect --no-site-packages
$ cd pickupconnect
$ source bin/activate
(pickupconnect)$ git clone git@github.com:natea/pickupconnect.git
(pickupconnect)$ cd pickupconnect
(pickupconnect)$ pip install -r requirements.txt
(pickupconnect)$ python manage.py syncdb
(pickupconnect)$ python collectstatic -l
(pickupconnect)$ python manage.py runserver

Running tests

To run the tests (later we can integrate nose as the testrunner):

$ python manage.py test

Debugging

To aid in debugging, set a trace in your code:

import ipdb; ipdb.set_trace()

Resources

Below are some of the packages that we've used to build PickupConnect, or are considering using as the app matures.

Users

• django-userena User profiles, registration, login, password reset, etc.
• Example django-userena project
• django-socialauth Login via Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.
• django-badger award badges to most active users
• django-activity-stream display a stream of user's activity

Contacts

• django-contacts-import import your Yahoo, Google or vCard contacts.
• csvkit bunch of tools to work with CSV files. Useful for importing people's contact lists

Twilio

Twilio is a cool service that we use to connect you by phone with your friends and loved ones.

Thanks to Rob Spectre from Twilio for answering all of our questions, providing Twilio credit, and writing this thoughtful and inspirational blog post about losing someone you love

• twilio-python
• django-twilio
• django-twilio docs
• django-door integrating Django with Twilio
• django-twilio-utils

Form Fields

• USPhoneNumberWidget

Design

• Twitter Bootstrap UI framework for building nice-looking web applications
• compress-twitter-bootstrap Twitter Bootstrap ported to Compass (Ruby)
• famfam icon set
• django-famfam Cool icons that you can integrate into the design with {% load famfam_icon %} and {% famfam_silk 'building' %} where 'building' is the name of the icon image.

HTML5 Boilerplate

We're not using this right now, but if we wanted to make the site work better on mobile devices, it might be worth switching to this.

• html5boilerplate HTML5 Boilerplate is the professional badass's base HTML/CSS/JS template for a fast, robust and future-proof site.
• django-html5-boilerplate A Django project starting template with html5-boilerplate integrated.
• django-cms-html5-1140px-boilerplate A django-cms project starting template with html5-boilerplate integrated

Scheduling

We're not using these yet, but if we wanted to build better scheduling of the best times to call, we could use these packages.

• django-schedule this branch is not maintained so read this google groups post for an update
• glamkit-eventtools a fork of django-schedule that is like more up-to-date.

Mobile

• django-mobile Detects the user agent and lets you serve up different templates depending on the device.

If we wanted to build an API, for example to provide a backend to an iPhone or Android mobile phone app, we could build it with TastyPie.

• tastypie
• tastypie docs

Performance

• django-media-brute Automatic collecting, compiling, and minifying of CSS and JS for Django projects