Cheerluck

Crowd-created boards for those in need of cheer, good luck, and love

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Inspiration

Reddit card threads and Minji's brother's military service We know these two things sound a little funny together, but trust us, they formulated an idea. Our group was discussing the multiple threads on Reddit related to sending sick and unfortunate children cards through the mail to cheer them up. We thought there must be an easier, more efficient way to accomplish this. Our group also began to chat about Minji's brother, who served in the Republic of Korea Armed Forces. We talked about his limited Internet access, and how he tried to efficiently manage communication with those who supported him. Light bulb! Why not make a website dedicated to combining everyone's love and support in one convenient place?

What it does

Videos and photos and text, oh my! A little bit of love can go a long way with Cheerluck. Our user interface is very simple and intuitive (and responsive), so audiences of all ages can post and enjoy the website with little to no hassle. The theme is simple, bright, and lighthearted to create a cheerful experience for the user. Past the aesthetic, the functionality of the website is creating personal pages for those in stressful or undesirable times, such as patients, soldiers, those in the Peace Corps, and so on. Once a user has created a page for someone, people are welcome to either (a) create a text post, (b) upload photos, or (c) use their webcam/phone camera to record a video greeting to post. The Disqus and Ziggeo APIs allow for moderation of content. These posts would all be appended to the user's page, where someone can give them the link to view whenever they want as a great source of love, cheer and comfort. For example, if this had existed when Jihoon was in the military, he could've used his limited internet time more efficiently by visiting this one page where his family and friends were updating him on their lives at once. This visual scrapbook can put a smile on anyone's face, young or old, on desktop or mobile!

How we built it

• HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, Node.js, Bootstrap (worked off of a theme) • APIs: Ziggeo (videos), Disqus (commenting/photos) • Hosted on Heroku using our domain.com name • Also, Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer were used to create graphic design elements

Challenges we ran into

36 hours: Not as long as you’d think When this idea first came about, we got a little carried away with the functionality we wanted to add. Our main challenge was racing the clock. Debugging took up a lot of time, as well as researching documentation on how to effectively put all of these pieces together. We left some important elements out, but are overall proud of what have to present based on our prior knowledge!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our group is interested in web development, but all of us have little to no knowledge of it. So, we decided to take on the challenge of tackling one this weekend! We were very excited to test out different APIs to make our site functional, and work with different frameworks that all the cool kids talk about. Given the amount of time, we're proud that we have a presentable website that can definitely be built upon in the future. This challenge was more difficult than we thought it would be, but we’re proud of what we accomplished and will use this as a big learning experience going forward.

What we learned

• A couple of us knew very basic ideas of HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, node.js, and Heroku. We learned how they interact with each other and come together in order to publish a website. • How to integrate APIs to help our web app be functional
• How to troubleshoot problems related to hosting the website • How to use the nifty features of Bootstrap (columns! So wonderful!) • How to host a website on an actual .com domain (thanks domain.com!)

What's next for Cheerluck

We hope to expand upon this project at some point; there’s a lot of features that can be added, and this could become a full-fledged web app someday. There are definitely a lot of security worries for something that is as open as this, so we’d hope to add filters to make approving posts easier. Users could view all pages and search for causes they’d like to spread cheer to. We would also like to add the ability to make a page public or private. If we’re feeling really fancy, we’d love to make each page customizable to a certain degree, such as different colored buttons.

There will always be people in difficult situations who need support from loved ones, young and old, and this accessible, simple solution could be an appealing platform for anyone with internet access.

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