Sunday, July 28th 2013 6 years ago

Gentse Feesten meets Instaghent

I've been working a lot lately for my own personal projects next to the various freelance projects that I do. One of these projects is Instaghent. If you don't know Instaghent yet it's basically a special website for the city Ghent. All of the images that contain the #instaghent tag get pushed up there for display.

I've been working on a feature for the Gentse Feesten which is the biggest annual festival of Ghent. The city of Ghent promotes the usage of the tag #GF13 for all of the images taken during the festival. So why not use it? It's pretty unique. I've added a special page and expanded the already-somewhat-huge script to catch media tagged with #GF13.

It contains some features that I've haven't used on this website before. Real-time updates. Whenever anyone uses the tag #GF13, Instagram tells us there's a new image up and we collect it immediately. So it's pulled to Instaghent without any delay.

Alongside that, I've added individual pages for every picture. You get some metadata like captions, a profile picture, voting, a map. The map is accompanied by a street view image. Both of these are only shown if there is location data present. You get some cool details about the shot such as all the tags, the time it was taken, likes, comments and so forth.

What's even more amazing is that every person who has ever taken a picture containing #instaghent gets his own page.

Because of the bigger traffic and real-time features I've had to implement caching. I didn't have that before. I know, I know. So each time someone visited the website it had to do a database call. It all became a bit costly. Resources and money that could be better spent elsewhere. I'm glad I implemented caching, the whole app is a lot faster now and works smoother than ever before.

Oh, check out Instaghent on Behance if you haven't already.