Project Insight: Online alerting system for Gosport Ferry

I’ve recently had the pleasure of working with a local ferry company to build a new and complex website. Part of the suggested technical specification was to provide methods of alerting users to issues and cancellations that would affect the service, and I’m going to run through how we achieved this here.

The plan

We looked at all the available methods of easily showing service updates on the service – we decided we would approach it in a number of ways in order to get maximum exposure.

1. Provide a graphical representation of the status on every page on the site
2. Provide a mobile version of the website that focuses solely on the operational status of the ferry
3. Provide an RSS feed of status updates, allowing users to subscribe and therefore be alerted to any change
4. Automate alerting through Twitter under a specific hashtag
5. Email alerts to the ferry operator to ensure the status is returned to normal following an event causing disruption to the service
6. Provide a secure method of updating the status, with prepopulated choices of alert to prevent potential abuse

Planning

Firstly, we needed to decide upon the best way to allow the flexibility of altering and creating statuses, but only for authorised users (ie the senior management team of the ferry company). We embarked on some custom PHP coding to interface with the CMS allowing each status to essentially be a page within the system – this then tied in with the relevant forms needed to facilitate the updates and worked perfectly.

We then built a HTML form, which generated the values dynamically from the database and populated the select box with the options required. This was built to prevent tampering, as the submission was sanity checked against those allowed values.

Secondly, we needed to get this information out. We used Twitter and RSS feeds as an effective way of relaying the information alongside the graphical status information. The RSS feed was relatively simple and could be subscribed to by a number of pieces of software and used within other services. Twitter would be used to instantly distribute the news to a wide audience. We were aware that local media use Twitter and would take this information on board and potentially help with the news distribution.

Thirdly, we needed to remind the staff that they had changed the status – if ferry users planned around these updates, and the issue was no longer relevant, it could cause lost custom for the company. We decided that we’d alert the staff that the status had been changed away from normal, and keep reminding them regularly that this was the case – sure this would generate a lot of emails, but it would encourage the status to be updated as soon as practical.

Finally, we needed this to work on a mobile platform – the ferry crew are the best placed to make decisions on the safety of the operations, and they don’t necessarily have access to a computer. The solution therefore needed to work from mobile devices over a 3G connection. We provided a mobile template that showed the status, and allowed authorised users to change this – the mobile interface had exactly the same effect as updating from a regular browser, in that the emails would be generated, and Tweets sent.

The results

See them for yourself, visit Gosport Ferry’s website and you’ll be able to see it all in action. If you are local, and make use of the Gosport Ferry, follow them on Twitter.