Picnicmob.eu

Picnicmob.eu was a just-for-fun site I built with Conrad Barski in 2007, online in English and Dutch at picnicmob.eu and hosted by Nucleus. Visitors answered 30 mostly silly (yet insightful) questions about their interests and tastes, and a program then worked out where everyone should sit in a virtual park so that people with the same interests sat closest to each other. Once a thousand people had signed up, the plan was to announce an official “picnicmob”.

The questions. The site showed one multiple-choice question at a time, from “If you had a machine that could peer into the past, what would you look at first?” onwards, and only asked for a name and an email address at the end. A verification mail confirmed the address before the answers counted, and when someone came back with the same name and email address their latest answers replaced the old ones.

Cities and languages. People signed up for the cities where they wanted to attend a picnic, once per city. Every question, answer and city was stored with its translations, so the whole site switched between English and Dutch, and a separate back end let us manage the questions, answers, cities and their translations.

Technologies: PHP, symfony, Propel, MySQL, Prototype, XHTML, CSS, i18n (English and Dutch).