Inspiration
I've always loved the UCSD Free Food Brigade Facebook group, but I've found it a bit lacking in one area. It's hard to tell what events are coming up. To find out where the free food events are for today I have to go through a lot of posts. Sometimes groups post about their events a week ahead of time while others do it at the last minute. I've always wanted a way to quickly see what events are happening soon.
How it works
I wanted to site to be as straight-forward as possible so it all runs on a single page. I didn't want users to have to spend time learning a new system. When a student goes to my site they'll see a calendar showing all the free food events for this month. They're able to change this calendar into weekly and daily view to better refine what events are shown.
The student can also sign up for a daily email. This sends out every morning and has a list of all free food events for the day. It's for students who don't want to have to visit the site every day and would prefer to have a daily digest.
The data is collected by events users contribute online. It's not feasible for one person to know about all the free food events on campus and so crowdsources is a great way to accomplish this. Invites will be sent out to campus organizations to allow them to create an account and add events to the calendar.
Challenges I ran into
Getting cron jobs to work for the daily email. I haven't done much work in scheduled tasks and it took a lot of reading to figure out how to do them.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm very proud of the daily digest email. I know how annoying it is to have to visiti a site constantly and digests are one of my favorite features a site can offer.
What I learned
I've never been on the devops team before so this was my first time deploying a website. I had to set up the database, server, and DNS records. I ended up using MongoLab, DigitalOcean, and Namecheap and it was very educational to learn how to use all of their tools.
What's next for Free Food UCSD
Hopefully a mobile app. I want an app that can alert someone to a free food event starting nearby and soon.
Notes
If the first link provided doesn't work please try the IP address. The DNS is still propagating so it's possible the domain will still redirect to my domain registrar's default page.
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