Week 6 Update
Kate
I’m working on putting functionality into the pop up form where users can submit free food events and have that post to the server and show up on the main screen. This weekend I will be working on more of that. The presentation on Volley was really interesting and I might try to look into that a little more and check out the pros and cons of using it for our app.
Zach
This week I implemented cron scheduling using the npm cron library. This allows me to call the Facebook API at regular intervals. For testing, I have been calling the API every two minutes to get results in a reasonable amount of time. For our actual implementation we plan on calling the Facebook Graph API somewhere between every five and every twenty minutes. This will allow us keep the database updated without putting any excessive strains on our Heroku or Facebook Graph API privileges. Our implementation is shown below. As I began to understand the cron timing syntax more it suddenly became very intuitive. I want to experiment more with scheduling on future products. I believe this could be a very powerful feature when combined with push notifications.
In addition to the cron scheduling, I started looking into ways of identifying food items from a list. This will allow us to identify which foods are in each Facebook post. I have been browsing the internet to find APIs or other web tools that would do this for me. I am currently in communication with Crystal Schlegelmilch from spoonacular about using their API to identify foods. Spoonacular.com is a website that allows users to manage different recipes and and meals for easy reference. I sent Crystal a description of our app and what we want to use her API for. She seemed really nice and hopefully we can nurture a positive relationship with her if she lets us integrate her API. I am also compiling a list of foods that would likely show up in a free food at Tufts post so we could handle food identification on our own. Having the spoonacular API would be helpful and allow our app to be more flexible, but our own list is already pretty comprehensive.
Next week I want to finalize our method for extracting relevant text from the Facebook page.