HTTPS works as well as Automatic Admin Functions!

Thanks to enabling communication on port 443 (SSL) on our virtual server, HTTPS now works! Facebook users using secure browsing should now be able to view our app! That's one major obstacle solved!

We now have a new logo, which we'll use for our Facebook ad campaign. Our livesite has been updated with our changes.

Some administrator functions used to return bids when a prediction closes and endow money each day have become automated.

Now on to Week 5:

• More questions
• Tutorial
• Advertisement
• Storing/Collecting data for analysis
• Secondary prediction table: (meta info including links, link to an image/icon, last value)
• Perhaps a table to track prediction values over time
• Better Prediction interface
• Improvements to leader tables and user info

New server and https

We set up the new server thanks to Steven Low and George Lee; it works.  You can now play the live version of our game at apps.facebook.com/foresight_game. Unfortunately, we still do not have HTTPS working. The certificate appears to be setup well in Apache, but for some reason, the site won't load with https. Those using Facebook's secure browsing will just have to wait.

We also implemented the feature to remove bids. You get your reserved money back upon doing so. Upon the close of a prediction, users ought to get their money back for any unresolved bids; this has yet to be done.

There were also graphical and user interface changes on the test site that haven't been uploaded on the live site.

We're still working on the tutorial.

Layout Changes and Future Goals

We decided that it would be better to split our single big page into a bunch of smaller pages in order to reduce future server load. Don't worry though, since our tabbed layout has stayed the same.

In the future, we will want to just have 4 main pages.

•  A Homepage listing some popular predictions
• The list of predictions and their current probabilities
• User's status (what prediction shares they own and what they are bidding on)
• Help (how to play, how to get more information)

When you access a single prediction, you will be given information about the prediction such as when the market closes, and what prices it is being traded for. You can then post a bid; if the bid can be fulfilled, it will be immediately transacted.

This last step needs to be done. We also want our site to look nice.

We also have issues with HTTPS still, which we are trying to resolve.

Where to put Leaderboards and how we're gathering data will be done later. Perhaps another database table could store the latter.

Since we're close to going live, we will want a playground/test area so that we can continue to make improvements without impacting our live site.

Connecting with Facebook and Verifying Postgres

Using Alex's UGCS account, we were able to authenticate/authorize with the Facebook API, extracting the user ID. The Graph API is very useful for accessing this data. At the same time, we were able to access the Postgres database on UGCS by creating and dropping a table.

You can check out our Facebook test app at: http://ugcs.caltech.edu/~alexf/test.php

One interesting setback seems to be that UGCS does not support HTTPS since it lacks a trusted SSL certificate. Unfortunately, we will probably need to find a new location to host our site.