Social.Chapman

Live, real time social media aggregation

Social.Chapman collects approximately 1,000 social media posts per month from our official Chapman University social media accounts. This website uses the APIs provided by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Wordpress, and Pinterest to aggregate and distribute social network content in real time. As our schools and colleges post to social media from around campus, notifications will appear in your browser.

Custom built with open source technologies

"We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them... Environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments." - Steven Johnson

Social.Chapman has been built using a variety of open source code frameworks initially, we created it with:

• Node.js enabled us to create an event-driven application, pushing new posts to the browser instantly.
• Socket.io helped us to achieve cross-device real-time support.
• Mongo DB simplified the way we store data.
• Handlebars enabled lightning fast client-side templates.

Since inception, we have revised the project structure. The current version is powered by Ruby on Rails. In the future, we plan to integrate the social data collected here with our other marketing platforms.

Our creative process

Strategic Marketing and Communications at Chapman University created this social media hub in-house. Our Web and Interactive team is comprised of both staff and student web developers and designers. We saw a need to bring all of our campus Social Media content together in one place.

We recognize that the design process is iterative and our social media aggregation service will always be evolving. We already have many ideas on how to expand this service to enhance our web presence.

The project has been in the works since the spring of 2012 and has been a collaborative effort between many of our developers and designers.