Pulse

Do great things, one accomplishment at a time.

See The Production App

Vision

A community that enables individuals to accomplish great things.

Execution

Pulse will be a single-page app centered around a chronological stream of accomplishments. Its primary purpose is to encourage people to accomplish small things. Its secondary purpose is to deter atrophy.

The Stick

Atrophy in the community immediately affects everyone. Artificial lag is introduced so that "passive" actions like commenting on accomplishments becomes progressively more difficult to perform. This deters unproductive and unsightly comment threads. Emails will be sent out to laggards, encouraging them to share a recent accomplishment.

The Carrot

Accomplished users can bask in the praise of their peers and watch as they rise on the leaderboard. In future updates, we should further gamify this by adding badges. Sharing accomplishments also temporarily lifts the artificial lag, which should lead to praise and thanks from the community.

Technical Details

Back-end

• express 3
• mongodb
• socket.io
• nodejitsu

Front-end

• handlebars
• browserify
• ribcage-ui
• topcoat

Contributing

You'll need mongodb installed locally.

Start a development server:

$ npm install
$ npm install nodemon -g
$ nodemon server.js

Or run the tests:

$ npm test

Developing On Windows

Getting node and npm

• Install node.js from here
• Right click on "This PC" or "My Computer", go to Advanced System Settings and edit Environment Variables
• Add this to your PATH: C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\npm;C:\Program Files\nodejs
  • The first path might already be there, the second is neglected by the installer as of this time of writing
• Close and open your terminals. Commands like npm and node should now work.

Compiling native modules

• Install Python 2.7.3
• Install Visual Studio 2012 Express
• Install Windows SDK
• Install Visual C++ 2008 Redistributables
• Install OpenSSL
• Go to the pulse app directory and run npm install --msvs_version=2012

Deployment

Deployment is automatic and happens whenever a push to the master branch does not break the build.

License

Copyright (C) 2014 Ben Ng, Rohan Kapoor, Jay Bensal and Contributors

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.