ClipTheTrip.com - How I Built This

Clipthetrip.com is a fun, free crowd sourced destination guides. From a data modeling perspective it has a pretty simple object interaction. There is Location object, there is CLIP object, there is photo object and a user object. MongoDB was used as a data store so objects were quite denormalized instead of a referential model.

Some of the technologies and API used for building the site is as follows:

• MongoDB
• .NET MVC3.0
• .NET 4.0 web optimization library for Js and CSS minimizing and combining
• jQuery Plugins
  • Wookmark
  • jQuery Lightbox
  • qTips
  • GMap3 for google maps
  • jQuery Fullscreen for homepage background
  • Imagesloaded
  • Autosuggest for location suggestion
  • Plupload for uploading images
  • Tablesorter
  • CookieControl from the pesky Europe cookie law
  • jQuery Reject
• External API's
  • Weather information using Accuweather
  • Currency using Webservicex service
  • Business search using Bing
• Image processing using SimpleDotImage library
• Generating offline PDF's using wkhtmltopdf
• HtmlAgilityPack for screen scrapping
• Amazon SES for email

As part of this article I am sharing code snippets of how I extracted information from external API's and other smaller code snippets. Since most part of the site is just CRUD operations, I feel it would be a waste to explain the code structure or architecture (considering architecture is quite simple!)

Currency data from Webservicex.net
Example page: http://www.clipthetrip.com/city/london
Business information from Bing
Weather information from Accuweather
Example page: http://www.clipthetrip.com/city/london
Image Resizing using SimpleDotImage
Javascript and CSS bundling using Web.Optimization