Inspiration
With a love of both bananas and web design, we sought to use a fun concept as a means to challenge ourselves with new frameworks, coding methodologies, and APIs.
What it does and how we did it:
In our project, we built a website that hosts various banana facts- laid out in a modular design. The website, "Banana Bananza", hosts 3 key "modules.”
In the first, we track the stock of popular banana distributor "Dole", retrieving the information from the New York Stock Exchange using the 'Yahoo Finance' API. We display it using the 'AnyChart' library.
In the second module, we display the 'top 3 trending banana articles' by utilizing the API provided by newsapi.org.
In the final module, we provide the user with a fact about bananas. Below this fact there is a button that, when pressed, provides the user with another random banana fact stored within a JS file.
The website was developed using the python framework Django as the backend, and front end was developed and styled using standard HTML and CSS.
Challenges we ran into
Originally we tried to get the price of bananas at grocery stores via web scraping. While we were able to get a web scraper developed using Python and the ‘BeautifulSoup’ library… gathering price information from major chains proved to be difficult due to their blockers. Using the grocery chains’ APIs also proved difficult, as most were exclusive to invite or geared towards company associates.
To solve this issue, we switched concepts- using the same Python library, ‘BeautifulSoup’, to scrape top articles for bananas- gathering our information from Google News.
While our web scraper did work… we could not incorporate it into our Django framework due to framework compatibility issues. However, we were able to incorporate the news concept utilizing the API mentioned above.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We didn't quit! Having minimal knowledge of Python, API calls, and many of the tools within Django, we challenged ourselves to pursue a project that would teach us more about these valuable tools and concepts. While not every idea we had was successful, we taught ourselves valuable skills, and learned about working together as a team to create a project!
What we learned
Working in teams
Web scraping techniques
New APIs’ and Frameworks.
Django
What's next for Banana Dash
UX/UI improvements, extra features (including some we found challenging during this Hackathon) and then create a repository as a portfolio project.
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