IT Milk: entry

I want to throw some positive light on a web application that is not hyped enough in the Penn State community. I was exposed to LionSchedules.com through word-of-mouth when I saw a couple of my classmates using it to lay out their schedules for Fall 2007.

Lion Schedules Makes Penn State Scheduling Easy

Lion Schedules solves the following problems:

• No more tediously blocking out your possible schedule on paper
• The ugly and inefficient interface of Penn State’s own class schedule database
• AJAX technology constantly updates you on how many seats are left for a class
• Visually see how your week of classes fit together
• Adds a social element by being able to save your schedule and share it with friends using static URL’s

The most amazing part about Lion Schedules is that the creator David Smith does not have a programming background. David is an architectural engineering major, and he puts the IST and CS majors to shame with his motivation to accomplish such a project.

Next, what’s also impressive is that Penn State does not have an API to work with the class schedule database. Unless he has access to some hidden XML feed, David Smith is somehow scraping the content off the static HTML pages and then constantly updating his own dynamic database of class schedules.

Good job, David. Give him some props on his Facebook wall.