Fluidinfo Developer CompetitionPosted on April 05, 2011

I've finally had time to work on something for the Fluidinfo & O'Reilly API Competition, which ends this weekend. The guys at Fluidinfo recently imported tons of metadata about O'Reilly Books and they want to see how people will use it. My idea is to integrate the data with my Resumé project, FluidCV. FluidCV has been missing a skills section for a while since I haven't had time to work on it between school, internships, etc. So, instead of a traditional (boring?) list of skills, why not list O'Reilly books that match my skills.

What I did was tag a few books about Python, Perl, Unix, and Git with gridaphobe/skill. Then I told FluidCV to find the books I had tagged, and retrieve the title, homepage, and cover-small tags under the oreilly.com namespace. This way I can construct a nice group of book-covers (with on-hover titles and a link to the book's homepage) that represent my skills. Of course this isn't just for me, anyone can create their own FluidCV by following the instructions on the main page.

One note, I haven't yet added the ability to add these tags in the FluidCV edit pages; hopefully I'll have time to do that this weekend before the competition deadline. The edit page now has a nice autocompleting form for adding skills! Take a look at my FluidCV for an idea of what the end result will look like.

Update: Some technical details for those interested.

• FluidCV is written in python and runs on Google App Engine.
• There is no local datastore. Everything except for the HTML layout comes from Fluidinfo.
• There's no reason the layout can't be stored in Fluidinfo. This is actually how I would implement user-customizable layouts if/when people start to use FluidCV.

• I used the following tags from the O'Reilly data:

• oreilly.com/title
• oreilly.com/homepage

• oreilly.com/cover-small

• When you navigate to http://fluid-cv.appspot.com/gridaphobe, FluidCV executes the following query to find my skills.

• has gridaphobe/skill and has oreilly.com/title¹

• Then FluidCV grabs the aforementioned tags and inserts them into the HTML layout.

It's actually really simple, although the skill editing page is a bit more complicated.

I used the jQuery Token Input library to make a nice autocomplete form for adding skills (i.e. you type "Python" and it gives you a list of all books that have Python in the title) and a simple jQuery call to populate the list of all books once the page is loaded. The autocomplete form gives me a list of Object UUIDs corresponding to the books the user chose, which I can then tag with username/skill.