Be Excellent To Each Other

A service providing positive reinforcement for stopping harassment. Changing minds, not just filtering content.

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Inspiration

A big part of this hackathon is stopping harassment so ideas can flow freely. I want to help #HackHarassment. In the famous words of Bill and Ted (from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure), we all just need to be excellent to each other.

What it does

Content filtering algorithms to stop harassing words can miss words and only work online, making them a fix but not a solution. The only true solution is to change how people think. My website (BeExcellentToEachOther.me) provides positive reinforcement for committing to stop harassment by providing positive gifs (dogs, high fives, excellence) when the user says he wants to be excellent to others. The subliminal effects add together. In addition, SwiggitySwagDontFeelBad.com redirects to BeExcellentToEachOther.me to allow those who are feeling down (from harassment or anything else) to get excellent, positive gifs. (Apparently Domain.com had some trouble when I set up the URL for redirect, and they now say it may take up to 48 hours for the URL forwarding to work properly.)

How I built it

The html, css, and javascript are on my githubs pages site for hosting, and at the domain BeExcellentToEachOther.me (thanks NameCheap.com!). Using Giphy's API, gifs from different categories relating to excellence (dogs, high fives, etc) are randomly chosen when the user presses a button. Giphy allows me to search gifs based on the categories, then provides a JSON file which I parse using JQuery. From the JSON file, a random gif from my search is chosen and then loaded dynamically as the background using JQuery.

Thanks to domains.com, SwiggitySwagDontFeelBad.com also redirects to BeExcellentToEachOther.me which allows others to find the service through a different domain.

Challenges I ran into

I have never made a website on a real domain before or used a javascript API, so figuring out where to start and then how to parse a JSON file were huge challenges.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Using html, css, and javascript together in an actual site available to the public because I have not ever done that before.

What I learned

How to use a Javascript API to load information from the web and how to parse a JSON file.

What's next for Be Excellent To Each Other

Adding Twitter support so users can quickly share the excellent gif delivered by my site in addition with the message of #HackHarassment.

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