This is just a quick update on where DartmouthRoomSearch is. It finally comes up on the first page of Google when you search "dartmouth room search"! And it's first! I've been using Google Analytics to track hits, which has been interesting.
I quickly did some visuals, and ended up with this 'passable' work:
It worked, to be sure...but it didn't look GOOD. The first major problem was the color scheme. I'm not sure why I went with the blue, but I realized that I probably should have gone with Dartmouth colors. I went to the Dartmouth website, and took the main color. It looks like this: . Now I need a color palette. First off, this site details the process of generating shades of the color you have (note 20% grey = 10% black). I also needed a complementary color, and from the same website observed this link to making a color palette. It utilizes a program called ColorScheme Studio, the free trial version can be downloaded from online. To activate it, you can (hypothetically) use the information located here. I fully support buying it, however.
I had all of the data, and I had it in an easily searchable MySQL database. Now, I had to figure out the best way to access it. I contemplated just having a bunch of search boxes, but that was quickly crossed out. It needed to be intuitive, and there were too many categories. I then thought maybe having sliders for the number of people and rooms, and the standard dropdown/checkboxes for the other values. Again, I vetoed this for something easier to grasp immediately.
I realized two days ago that there wasn't at all a good way to find rooms that fit your desires for upperclassmen housing. I contacted the housing office, and inquired as to if they had access to data about all of the rooms. Unfortunately, all they had was access to the same outdated floor plans that anyone could access. Sighing, I started looking through all of the PDF's to see if there was an easy way to extract the data. The links to the PDF's are scattered across pages, with differing numbers depending on what floors there are. I noticed they have a similar address pattern: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~orl/images/floor-plans-06/<first four characters of building name>-<floor number (0-4).pdf. I quickly got the building names by copying them all and running a quick strip, and then using the requests python module to check if the pdf file existed and then downloading it. You can check out the very easy download script here, on my Github.