Neev enabled Elighted users to share, view and respond to engaging content on the web through an easily accessible website and a ‘bookmarklet’ tool (toolbar).

The Client

Elighted is a self-funded web-based startup launched in January 2013 by two ambitious entrepreneurs in the USA.

Business Need

Elighted wanted to build a website and a web-based tool that would allow a user to share content from a particular website with any other user around the world. Their idea of an ‘e-lighting’ tool highlights text on a given webpage. They also wanted to categorize and share this content with other users. Each fragment of highlighted content would be referred to as an ‘elight’. The client also wanted to design a toolbar, to which the links could be added and had to work across a number of websites.

Neev Solution

The Application was developed entirely in Ruby on Rails (RoR). jQuery was used for implementing the toolbar and highlighting. A heat map was designed to color code the content on a page in red, orange and yellow representing the number of people ‘elighting’ a particular content, red being the highest. Green was used for content that was to be shared. The search feature where a person could search through highlighted text was designed using the elastic search module in AWS. Neev was involved not only in the product design, development and testing but also the maintenance of the servers. It was also the first time a deployment automation tool was used at Neev.

Technology footprint

• RoR
• MySQL
• AWS
• jQuery

Top features

• Ability to share , comment and like shared content
• Only users registered on Elighted website are allowed to share content
• My Library stores elights (text that has been shared), elaters (highlighted text that is not yet shared), comments, etc.
• Ability to follow a particular user and have a number of users following
• Selected Text can be customized or edited by the registered user
• Dashboard has info like ‘Most Popular’ and ‘Most Recent’ and enables user to customize his/her profile info
• Organized into ‘Arrays’ basically categories like Movies, Books etc. where elights are shared
• Arrays can be public or private
• Invite friends via Facebook or Mail to join a particular array
• Seamless integration with Facebook and Twitter
• Admin module for administering the website

Top Challenges

• Highlighting the exact text (the content to be shared) and implementing heat maps was difficult.
• To store the highlighted text boundaries and overlay the same on the actual page since the markup and design around the highlighted content may change.
• Caching a page’s content for sharing was also difficult as there would inevitably be a lot of irrelevant information on the web page
• Making the plugin / toolbar work across varied web pages with varied DOM structures required a lot of effort and time.