Colophon

Here are some technical details for the hardcore nerds:

The technology

Built with Ruby on Merb

This site and many of the tools we used to massage the data were written in Ruby 1.8. We heart Ruby.

The public website is built on the excellent Merb framework (1.1.0pre) with Datamapper (on MySQL ) and Haml/Sass. The whole stack runs on Phusion Passenger behind nginx.

Our trip planner, named Iroquois, is completely home grown and written in first-born sacrificing C. Built to support Iroquois is our custom memory based data store, MySQL proved too slow. The transit data was built and is maintained by our own hands and the street data comes from OpenStreetMap project.

Progressively enhanced

All the rich UI effects and enhancements are either core jQuery (1.4.2) or based on it in some way, with the exception of the Google Maps components.

Environments

The main application lives on a slice at Slicehost, while the trip planner currently resides on an Ubuntu VM in Kieran's apartment. The cat likes to sleep on it.

Typography

The headers are various families of Helvetica (if you have one), FreeSans, or Arial. All paragraph text is either Arial or your default sans-serif.