Inspiration
On-campus clubs and organizations bombard Wellesley students with emails, posters, and Facebook events every day--advertisements that are not-so-complimentarily referred to as "spam". Although we like to be engaged in the Wellesley community, it is hard to keep track of everything going on on-campus, and there are ultimately many unread emails, unseen posters, and underattended Facebook events. We wanted to build an app that addressed these problems.
What it does
SmorgasOrg allows Wellesley students to modify an interactive, public calendar by submitting events they want to share with the community. In addition, students can also add events they're interested in to their personal calendar.
How I built it
We create a public Google calendar that would be visible to everyone, and then we enabled editing permissions so that all members of a certain group (i.e. all gmail users with an @wellesley.edu account) would be able to revise the calendar. We then embedded this calendar into a website (built in HTML and CSS) that included a form for visitors to submit their events. In order to facilitate the successful submission events, we made use of a Google Calendar API (with help from Edwin, Zoe, and Solomon). A side effect of this API is the fact that site visitors are able to not only upload new events, but sync existing ones to their personal google calendars.
Challenges I ran into
We had a lot of trouble successfully making use of the API because the permissions were very complicated. First we had trouble collecting user data and storing that data into the functionality of the API--both because of the touchiness of Google permissions and because of binding errors. After we figure that out, we had to incorporate the API-related code into our HTML. This was hard because there many files to keep track of and we had to make sure not to lose important connections. Another challenge we had was adapting to writing programs in JavaScript in general, as both of us had only worked in Python previously.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are proud of: -figuring out how to use HTML and CSS to edit the website for our app and make it aesthetically pleasing -making use of text editor Sublime to write concise and well-formatted code
- figuring out google permissions so that we can now share SmorgasOrg with all of Wellesley.
What I learned
We learned about:
- APIs and the power of abstraction. We were making use of powerful codes built by others in a completely new project
- the many possibilities when it comes to programming. We got a taste of other programs like css, javaScript, and html--not just the Python we were learning in class.
What's next for SmorgasOrg
Our next step is definitely to get a domain name so we can get our app online and begin growing our userbase. We also hope to add elements such as rotating featured events and a daily summary of what's happening on campus that day. Once we are confident in our app's basic functionality, we would next invite all members of the Wellesley google group to become contributors to our public calendar so they could add the events they are passionate about and collect events that interest them.
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