Gaps In History

Reimagine reality by filling in the Gaps in History! You decide what outrageous events will lead to the present by coming up with the parts of speech necessary to complete a historical document.

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Inspiration

Have you ever wanted to rewrite history? What if you were the one in charge of writing the documents that crafted our nation and our literature?

What it does

Gaps in History allows you to rewrite history by changing key historical documents and literature. Our project lets you select a document and then change key words or phrases in that document to create outlandish alternate histories. Then you can share your story with friends by downloading or sharing the link!

How We built it

We deployed our app using Heroku on a Spring Boot framework. We used HTML for the main structure of the website, with routing handled by a Java program, and we used CSS to make it look weathered and worn like an old book from history. The back-end operations mostly use with JavaScript.

Challenges We ran into

Our team uses both PC and Mac, and trying to translate and troubleshoot the functions for setup proved to be time-consuming. We are relatively inexperienced in hacking, but we slowly got familiar with our setup. The largest hurdle we had to overcome with this project was receiving the user’s input from the HTML and passing it to different webpages so that it could be processed and displayed in different ways.

Accomplishments that We’re proud of

We were successfully able to implement communication between different webpages using user input, and we even learned how to send a custom file to Downloads on any computer. We also felt very accomplished and proud when we saw the first finished page of our website, knowing that our project was more than just some scripts and files. Finally, we were overjoyed to see our project running online on a dedicated website (with a sweet deal on a domain!).

What We learned

None of us knew much about creating and hosting web applications, especially with the framework we chose. We also only had limited experience with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We learned to be resourceful by scouring the Internet for example code and alternate solutions to various problems.

What's next for Gaps In History

We have many ideas for further development. There are some structure and formatting issues that could be resolved, as well as general code cleanup and refactoring. We also want to implement more features, such as allowing users to share their documents via social media and input their own documents to be altered (even storing these on a database for future users to enjoy).

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