Around about this time last year i set up dkitdown – a twitter account which highlights downtime and problems within my college. Today, dkitdown has gotten a new home along with a serious injection of life.
itisdown.com is the site i’ve been busy working on for the past couple of weeks. It’s not finished, it probably never will be but i’m happy enough to blog about it publicly now, although i’ll not really push it out until early next week. Think of this as an unofficial launch 
So where do i start?
Well here’s what the site looks like. Check it out for yourself.
I’ve mentioned before the site is based on a free wordpress template called p2. However, i’ve made several big changes to that theme as you can see from the site itself.
Social Stuff
One of the big changes i made was the login / signup process. I wanted to use facebook & twitter logins and came across rpx.com who have a great little wordpress plugin. After a bit of tweaking i got it working which means it literally takes just a couple of clicks to log in to the site and get posting.
How it works
Because this site is aimed at students like myself, i know that traditional sign up forms don’t work. We’re lazy and getting lazier and if something is complicated we won’t use it. We’ll just leave. So social logins are very important.
Once logged in, the user is greeted by a form titled ‘What’s the problem’. Here users can submit their problem, tag it and hit ‘submit’. Simple.
Once submitted the site will update in real time… no page reloads necessary. It’s one of the reasons i like this theme. Anyone can also thumbs up or thumbs down a post. Anyone can also leave a comment (and thumbs up / down the comment too).
The rating feature is critical to the site’s whole operation. You can perhaps see the benefit of it in the ‘hot topics‘ section where you can choose to view the highest rated posts from the last 7 days, 30 days etc… I’ll tweak this as time goes on but you can see the groundwork is in place for something pretty cool 
Pulling it all together
Separate to the site itself, i’ve created a facebook page which pulls in all posts from the site as does the existing twitter account. So it means that if a user submits a post, it auto updates the facebook feed and twitter feed. Typically people won’t visit the site. Hell, i won’t even visit the site once the novelty wares off. However, i will be on facebook and twitter and i’ll see the messages come in which will remind me about the site, so the entire social networking side of things is very important.
Just to take the bad look off itisdown.com, i’ve also put up a really simple site which links to all of the dkitdown accounts and explains briefly what the site is about. My Irish readers will now understand my thinking behind buying the domain itisdown.com – by creating subdomains i could in theory set up this sort of system for all IT’s in ireland, however that’s all for another day 
I’m aware of problems with the site, i know the site isn’t perfect, i know you’ll be able to pick holes and please do so – you are my guinea pigs
