Find A Safe Space
Inspiration
For a long time I'd wanted to know where to find all-gender restrooms were on-campus, since as a trans woman I'd had plenty of trouble getting used to the plain gendered restrooms. There's no bathroom in which I feel comfortable.. unless, of course, there wasn't a gender associated at all. Additionally, the school's resources are less than ideal, and I got the idea to make a resource hub of my own.
What it does
Any University of Rochester student can visit findasafe.space and find resources applicable to their LGBTQ+ needs; online resources, a virtual all-gender-bathroom locator, and even a direct connection to the school's LGBTQ+ support system.
How I built it
While building the basic structure in using Adobe's Dreamweaver in conjunction with Bootstrap, I registered the domain through domain.com and started setting up the Google Cloud Compute Engine instance, an f1.micro running Ubuntu 18 with a custom Apache server. It was easy to upload and troubleshoot my html and css on the actual server, and after the DNS updated, I even registered the server an SSL certificate. I also had to create and embed the actual Google Map, which took a long time to get mobile-friendly.
Challenges I ran into
While I'd had experience making a Wordpress website on an AWS instance, and therefore had worked with Apache before, I had never done anything else in this project before. I'd never edited html/css on a code level, I'd never used any of the software, never even heard of Google Cloud Services, and certainly never mobile-optimized or built a Google Map or registered an SSL certificate or anything.
What I learned
In the future, I will definitely be using Google Cloud servers for online projects, since the free-tier offerings are so much better than any other service I've been able to find. In addition, getting experience code-level with websites has been excellent and I learned so much about html structure and organization. Hopefully I'll be able to apply this knowledge to future projects and future websites.
What's next for Find A Safe Space
I was hoping that the project's scope could expand with subdomains. For example, if the nearby Rochester Institute of Technology wanted to do something similar, I could give them IAM permissions on the server and they could set up rit.findasafe.space. The service could conceivably grow a lot. The next additions I'd probably make would be a feedback form and maybe even a Google Adsense advertisement somewhere on the main page, just to keep the service afloat.
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