How to introduce participants to the event before it begins



    Very soon, the next 404 festival will begin. For its opening, I prepared a page on which I gathered all the participants so that they could get to know each other in person before the start of the festival: antonshein.ru/404fest (carefully, traffic is hidden behind the link).

    Under the cut, I’ll talk about why you need to create such pages for events, as well as a little talk about technical implementation.



    The value of any event consists not only in the reports read on it and the workshops held, but also in people. The more people who were able to meet at the event, the better.

    It is much easier to meet new people if you have already seen them somewhere and know something about them. To do this, on the official website of the 404 festival there is a page with participants:2012.404fest.ru/members .

    But reading a dry list is boring, and viewing in this way over 700 participants is almost impossible.

    At the same time, a long list of photographs is perceived much easier and attracts more attention. If only because often from a photograph you can suddenly understand, for example, that you are reading this person’s blog or are somehow familiar with it virtually.

    In addition, registered members can add each other to their favorites, and see who added them to their favorites. This additionally removes the barrier in person. Since in this case, at least there is always a topic for starting a conversation.

    The easier it will be for people to get to know the event, the more they will benefit from participating, and the more likely they will come to it next year.

    Technical Subtleties

    The technical implementation itself is as simple as a stump. First, the page of participants 2012.404fest.ru/members is parsed , after which the information of each participant from the list is parsed. After that, it remains only to save the data in the database and display them.

    This could be finished, but there are a couple of interesting points.

    Userpics

    Last year I made the first version of such a page, and I just took the userpics of the participants from the site of the organizers. After that, the site of the organizers quickly fell.

    This time I transferred the pictures to my server, but decided that if I give more than 700 users per connection, then my hosting will not stand it, even if I use lazy loading.

    Therefore, all previews of userpics were combined into sprites of 100 images each. A total of 8 pictures turned out like this: Whether such a design can withstand the habraeffect will soon become clear. :)




    Floor

    It was interesting to group participants by gender. But there is no such data on the official page of the event. I had to determine the gender by name. A list of women's names was taken and a simple comparison of the participant’s name with him was sufficient in most cases. Some names had to be added manually.

    The only difficulty turned out to be names like Sasha, Zhenya, etc. In this case, the search for the vowel letter at the end of the surname helped.

    Such simple measures were enough to sort the participants by gender. But I do not exclude that a mistake crept in somewhere. So if suddenly the system has allocated you to the wrong place - let me know, I'll fix it right away. :)

    Manual data processing

    Participants are not robots, and enter data carelessly. Therefore, when grouping, you can’t just rely on string comparisons and you have to work out many options manually.

    For example, to group by city, its name has to be processed as follows:
    function getCity(sRaw) {
        var sCity = $.trim(sRaw);
        var aCityTranslate = {
            'Yekaterinburg':'Екатеринбург',
            'г. Отрадный':'Отрадный',
            'Tolyatti':'Тольятти',
            'Novokuybuyshev':'Новокуйбышев',
            '55.895386,37.597364':'Москва',
            'Tula':'Тула',
            'ПГУ, Ижевск':'Ижевск',
            'Inc., Самара': 'Самара',
            'г. Самара': 'Самара',
            'Yoshkarola': 'Йошкар-Ола',
            'Zhigulevsk': 'Жигулёвск',
            'Cамара': 'Самара',
            'LLC, Самара': 'Самара',
            'Novomoskovsk': 'Новомосковск',
            '':'Неизвестинск'
        }
        sCity = aCityTranslate[sCity]?aCityTranslate[sCity]:sCity;
        return sCity;
    }
    

    The same lists are used to group by companies and professions, only they have much more elements.

    Otherwise, everything is quite simple and according to the workers and peasants. But if any points are interesting - ask, I will try to tell.

    PS: By the way, I myself read on 404 a report about time management: 2012.404fest.ru//themes/i-ll-be-back .



    If you are not from Moscow and are not going to the 404 festival, but you are interested in learning how not to fill up deadlines and find time to develop skills and create your own projects, write to me in PM. If there are a few who want it, I’ll read the report tomorrow night (most likely, in the “Workstation” coworgen).

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