It is with great excitement for me to report that Courselect reaches its first milestone within 5 days of its public debut. The website received over 100 visits in a single day today!
Here are some other numbers as of this blog post:
- 2,885 courses
- 12,093 classes
- 40 course textbooks
- 8.62 average page views
- 144 absolute unique visitors
Alright… I think that’ll be enough to motivate me to work on the other features! 
Great site, Scott. I pushed at least 6 people to check it out.
I’m not sure what your plans are for new features, or how you care to take requests, but it would be immensely helpful if you were able to provide links to the classes that each class allows you to take. (ie: The ECE 231 page shows that if you take it, you can then take ECE 332.)
Ideally, the entire dependency tree would be shown… (well, that would be ideal for me, maybe not an artsie.
)
Thanks for passing the word on!
The dependency tree would certainly be nice to have, but I will have to complete some pretty extensive data transformation before I can work on that feature. The UW course calendar doesn’t have a strict format on how the pre/anti/co-requisites are listed, which makes this quite difficult.
The requisites you see on the website right now are partially cleaned data. When you see course numbers that are not linked, those are exceptions not captured by my algorithms which I’ll have to fix.
Even with that done, it can become quite expensive to generate the whole tree for 2800 courses (while considering the crazy cross-lists too, there are over 250 pairs of such courses)! There are also secret anti-reqs not listed on the course calendar too… *sigh* (example: ECE 355 vs. ECE 451, ECE 452, ECE 453)
Getting the right electives in engineering is sure a huge pain in the butt… that was one of the driving factors behind the project.
Anyways, in summary, I’m working on improving the data quality so I can proceed with the development of more features that depends on federated data. =)
Oh warning: ECE 332 is NOT a fun course… people go crazy in there.
[...] glad to report that Courselect received a healthy 202 visits from 191 unique visitors. This is twice as good as the initial version! In the new “version 3”, I will be enlisting the help from Richard to take on an ever-growing [...]