• Like a class? Now you can review it. Moreover, we keep track of who teaches each class, so you can see all the reviews a professor has received for all the classes he’s taught (in addition to the median grades for those classes!)
• Listing used textbooks for sale to other Cornell students. With over 3,000 users now, you’re sure to find a buyer!
• Direct to Google Calendar export

Along with these changes, we’re also moving the site to cornell.chequerd.com. You may access the old site at the www.chequerd.com as usual, but we’ll cease to update it as of today, and plan to shut it down by the end of the year. Unfortunately, because we’ve changed the way your passwords are stored, to make them even more secure, we decided not to migrate accounts on the old site over, and you will have to create a new account.

On a more technical level, this upgrade represents a major transition on the backend, as we’ve ported the entire PHP codebase over to Ruby On Rails. Rails  is a more full featured platform than our hastily cobbled together scripts in PHP (and even a little Java, for the class description scraper), and it will allow us far greater flexibility in making changes and modifications. The PHP code was turning into quite a jungle of code, and you weren’t ever sure if something would go terribly wrong if you made even a small change. Versioning, so crucial to software projects of even modest size, was notably absent (though not for want of trying).

Now, however, Chequerd on Rails is clean, versioned via Git, and hosted on Heroku. In fact, Heroku was a major reason for the transition. Their hosting service is super easy to use, and provides many powerful addons that free up our time to work on cool new features, instead of having to reinvent the wheel. In the past, even though we gathered updated roster data every day, it would require a manual push to make it live as we were paranoid that our script would fail halfway, leaving the roster in disarray. With the Chequerd, it was a cinch to make the entire roster update atomic, so we’ve bit the bullet and turned on completely automated daily updates.

As a final note, we’ve also added some experimental ways of monetizing the site, such as Google ads and sponsored links on the front page (email us if you’re interested!). We’re not looking to get rich, just to cover the costs of hosting the site, so your support is much appreciated =). We hope that you will find Chequerd useful, and as always, feel free to email us about anything and everything!

We’ve updated chequerd for Spring 2010, and added a slew of new features and tiny conveniences.

• Search! With an exclamation point, because this is the big one. Now you can search for classes by department and number (e.g. ANSC 3600), by title (‘Beef Cattle’), or by day and time. It took a while, but we hope you like the interface. Expect some tweaks in the (near?) future, with the ability to filter searches by median grades and class sizes and college.
• Median grades going back to Spring 07. Yes they changed the course numbers, but we have a secret sauce. 12 trained monkeys and a typewriter or a brilliant algorithm, you decide.
• Better conflict handling. Long a bugbear but now working quite reliably. By default conflicts are disallowed now, but you can turn them on under ‘Options’. Also, a little red thingy appears to tell you if there are conflicts. Just so you know.
• Drop down menus in a few places. Not terribly exciting, but always a good way to clean up the place.

And don’t forget, you can now share your schedules. See the previous post, and remember you can enable sharing here and choose which ones to share here.

Finally, a shoutout to our users who gave us feedback and spurred the addition of many of these new features. They were already in the pipeline to be sure, but there’s nothing like a little motivation =).

Enjoy!

In other news, median grades are up, though their only available from fall 2008 for now. You can see them after you add a class to your list of classes, right under the description. Descriptions, which should be more comprehensive now =).

Enjoy!

The analogy is simple. Imagine you arrived in a country where everyone spoke 2 or 3 languages. And you wanted to write about your travels and travails, your biography and magnum opus. You spend a year or so picking up their language (it’s kinda like English, say Phnglish), and eventually publish your work. It becomes increasingly popular, but one day you realize – your publisher won’t be able to keep up if people keep buying your book at an increasing rate. So you start hunting around for a new publisher, but the only one you can afford only has a press that can print in Pynglish, which is like Phnglish, but different enough that you’d have to spend another 6 months learning and translating your book. Oh, and all the books spontaneously combust if the publisher can no longer keep up.

That’s essentially the state of things, and a preemptive explanation for any mysterious outages to come. We certainly want to keep things running smoothly, and it was a hard decision to decide to go ahead with the Sun interview, but it seems inevitable that they’d write about us regardless (yeah, we’re just full of ourselves =).

Anyway, it was about time people nudged Chemical Engineering Lab off the list of top 10 classes, where it’s at #5 currently. (we’ll publish the list soon, hopefully – it’s interesting seeing a slice of the zeitgeist here on our hill).

iCal support

Calendar export is now baked in, it’s one click to download your schedule as a standard .ics file, which is compatible with Google Calendar, iCal, Thunderbird, Outlook, and beyond. You no longer have to manually, tediously input everything into your calendar – just export it from chequerd and import it into your calendar of choice. All the classes repeat as you would expect for the entire semester.