The Active.com Realtime website has now been collecting data for several months.  This is the first time we've looked at site usage with respect to a user's location, and it presents the opportunity to do some insightful data analysis.

For example, did you know on average San Diegans register for events within 3 weeks of the start date, and they tend not to travel very far.  When they do travel they tend to go to Los Angeles. ; But, people from the east coast often travel farther.  For example, when registrants from Philadelphia travel for an event,  they often go to Salt Lake City.  The trend of  east coast people traveling further than west coast might be explained by the weather; the west coast simply has weather more consistently suited for endurance events, and a greater number of events taking place.  How do people in the middle of the country fare?  Using Las Vegas as an example, top destinations are split between Sacramento, Atlanta and Jacksonville, showing a wide variability in destination.

We also looked at the most popular time of day registrations were completed.  For almost all of cities, the morning hours between 8 and 11 were most popular, with an additional spike in activity around 8pm.  Evening registrations were especially prevalent in the city of Seattle; could it be all the coffee?

Finally, the registration sport was detailed per city.  Running and walking events were found at the top, with cycling and triathlon trailing close behind.  Other sports such as swimming, fitness and adventure racing also ranked among the top.

We launched Phase I of Active.com Realtime in order to prove a few concepts - namely A) that we could create an extensible infrastructure that efficiently taps into the activity happening on Active.com and B) that there was interest in this sort of thing.  Before we launched, we knew the technology was sound, but we were pleasantly surprised to the positive reaction external and internal audiences had to the prototype. So, we embarked on Phase II with the aim of improving design and incorporating different types of data.

I'm happy to announce the availability of Active.com Realtime, Phase II at http://labs.active.com/realtime.  Active.com Realtime is to showcases what people in a given city are searching for, registering for, and the results their viewing on active.com right now.  The goal of the site is to help you make a decision about what event you might like to participate in by showing you what's popular in your area.

Here's a screencast explaining Active.com Realtime's features:

Hi, I'm Rob and I'm a Software Architect on the Light Engineering Group here at Active. LEG, as we call it, was modeled after the LED group at LinkedIn. LinkedIn was looking for a way to rapidly prototype new technologies and architectures with Ruby on Rails. Their first product was Bumper Sticker which at one point was the mostly highly trafficed Facebook application in existence! You can find many of the fruits of LEG's labor at http://labs.active.com

This morning we officially launched our new Active Widgets site at http://widgets.active.com This was a quick two week project to create an embeddable window into Active.com's thousands of registerable events. The idea being that the blog you write about running/cycling/baseball can show a list of upcoming marathons/track events/Little League games in your area. The widget is customizable as far as what activities it displays, where it displays them, whether or not the user can change those settings, as well as the size and color of the widget itself. Once your done just click a button and you're given a couple of simple Javascript tags to drop onto your site wherever you want the widget to appear. And since the widget is written out onto your page like any other HTML, you can further customize it using your own CSS.

The Technical Stuff

This customization site (known as The Configurator) is a Sinatra application written in Ruby. There is no database—the data store is a single YAML file which defines a widget and what about it is customizable. The widget itself is written in Javascript and after minification with the YUI Compressor, the whole thing is 14K (for comparison, the Google homepage is 47K).

Since we planned on having the widget be embeddable on any website we couldn't use Ajax to pull in the event listings. Ajax is subject to strict cross-domain security policies set by your browser—you can only access servers in the same domain that the page itself was served from. This is quite a problem since search results are coming from http://search.active.com  The workaround for this issue is to make server calls with <script> tags and then wrap the resulting code in a function call known as a callback. When the <script> tag is added to the page the browser immediately executes it as valid Javascript. Since this Javascript contains a function call (the callback) it looks a function you've already defined with the same name and calls it, passing in the returned data.

The server itself is an Amazon EC2 instance running in their cloud infrastructure. This allows us to quickly react to any scaling needs by simply spinning up a new instance of the same server and deploying the code to it. Nearly half our division's products are now running on EC2 and we're moving more there every day. We've found it be an fast, secure and cost effective way to get our applications live.

Stay tuned for more exciting projects from the LEG team!

We've just released our newest project to labs.active.com, Active Classifieds.  Have you ever wanted to assemble a group of people to block wind for you on a weekend ride or sell an old baseball glove? 

Active Classifieds is a simple app designed to make it easy for you to sell your old sports stuff or meetup with like-minded people. 

Dive in and let us know what you think.