Inspiration
If we wish to know more about a country, the search results will be full of official government sites, or sites with long long text, and the information, may or may not be as written by love
This is where Know-The-Place comes in, where you can read posts/articles which are written by real users like you and then get a better understanding of the country
What it does
Anyone can visit the site and read about the posts/articles which are written for a country by real-world users like you! If the posts don't satisfy you, or you wish to add your thoughts to it as well, then you are more than welcome to add your own post for any country.
How we built it
This web app was built using: Front-End: HTML, CSS, JavaScript(API) Back-End: Django, Python
I, Anubhav worked on the backend part, creating the app, adding databases, API's etc., while my teammate Chetan worked on the front end by adding and modifying the CSS and beautifying the pages we see. GitHub link to repo: https://github.com/anubhav06/about-place
Challenges we ran into
We ran into a number of challenges which are:
- API Calls: On the main page, we get a country's flag by making a API call. First we planned to search the google with the country's name and then get the image. But for that we figured out that we needed an API key. Then after surfing more about it we got to know, that using google's programmable search engine, we can accomplish that. Then we signed up for all that stuff. It fetched the images successfully, but we discovered we were soon out of the 100 free requests each day we get with that. So then we planned to buy that using the Google Cloud Credits. This was followed by surfing and understanding google cloud for hours, linking your account and getting free credits. After a lot of time, we were able to get 10k requests for each day. But that was still not enough, as while testing and building our app only, it consumed a lot of requests. Then my teammate came up with this site https://restcountries.com/v3.1/name/ where we can get info about a country for free using their API. We finally used there API with no limit on requests!
- Time constraint: This was our first hackathon and 48hrs seemed to less for us being the first time
- Deploying: We had never deployed any app to the web, and this was the first time. We took long hours to understand how it works, following the step by step tutorial but at the end ran into an error and couldn't deploy. However this was tried during the last 1-2 hrs before the deadline, so this could be fixed is there was more time (We will deploy it after submitting the project)
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Both of us participated for the first time in a hackathon! We are able to build so much in just our first hackathon! We are able to communicate and collaborate without us knowing each other from before! We learned a lot of new things!
What we learned
- Collaborating and communicating with each other in a hackathon
- Got the real essence of a hackathon and how it works
- Using Git and GitHub to collaborate with your project
- API Calls, how to make it, what to do after it , understanding promises and responses.
- Building a project with Django from scratch
What's next for Know-The-Place
This project has a lot of future features, which we were not able to implement due to time-constraint
- Adding Like/Unlike to the posts
- Adding Images to the posts
- Adding comments to the posts
- Filtering post based on different conditions, like most liked, recently uploaded etc.
- Adding the ability to edit a post
- Deploying it and buying a domain name
- A section which contains some basic info about each country, written by the devs
- Add pagination feature, and displaying only a certain no of countries at a time on the main page ....and much more....
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.