Show HN: UK school search application | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: UK school search application

3 pointsrytis3 comments

- WHAT -: UK school search database. Free text search by school name, address, headteacher's name. Free text search by location (lists all nearby schools). For those of you not in UK, there's a list of example searches, so you still can try it out. Also show crime stats in the area.

- WHY -: Offer a free search tool to everyone hoping that this will attract enough traffic and the list gets noticed. Moneymaking plan is to offer customised lists to businesses.

- HOW -: Backend is a Django+Tastypie application. Frontend is a simple jQueryUI script. API has throttling enabled to prevent data scraping. I hope it's tuned properly and "normal" users won't get throttled. DB is dual - RDBMS (for "static" data such as addresses, etc) and Redis (for crime stats, etc). Although I'm considering switching to MongoDB. Piecharts are simple, static GoogleCharts.

- WHERE -: http://www.slipperysnake.co.uk/schools-database/

It's a simple app, yet I'd like to know what people think. Any comments greatly appreciated!!

That's a nice idea, I considered doing something similar a few years back. Instead of going to businesses had you considered going to the county councils directly and expanding your service in partnership with them. Many councils provide this data already, albeit in a less accessible form, this could be where your service comes in.

Your 'Search for a School' feature doesn't currently work however 'List nearby schools' seems fine. Maybe add a directory listing as an alternative to just searching.

If you're planning on pushing this into production, wordpress may not be the best backend to build upon.

I'd also recommend you check out Mark Pilgrim's 'Dive into Accessibility', it's a fantastic resource that I'm sure you'll find useful. http://diveintoaccessibility.org/

I was really thinking about this, ie WP vs custom-built. Couple of reasons we've gone with WP:

) There's (going to be) a lot of static content - informational pages, etc - and it's so easy to build the structure with WP. Having a user friendly backend is also essential. ) Time. However much I'd love to spend time building own custom CMS I just don't have time to do this. This project is a side project and I have full time job. So anything that allows me to achieve my goal without spending extra time is a winner in this contest.

Drawbacks are obvious - scalability, inflexibility to build web apps, etc. Until we grow into something bigger I'm afraid we're stuck with WP.

Behind the scenes however there's a Django app (managing school list) and a Flask app (word search generator).

I'm building more Flask based apps at the moment. So WP effectively is a CMS for static pages and a container for some JS.

BTW, very interesting read (diveintoaccessibility.org), thank you!! I'm quite far from design, etc so this is def a good resource for me!

With regards to 'search for a school' it seems to be working ok, although there's a "bug" (feature?) where if you enter something that it cant find it won't tell you about it and won't display anything. Try entering anything from the list which is below the input field and wait for autocomplete to catch up. I need to fix this though really.

Clickable:

http://www.slipperysnake.co.uk/schools-database/

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