Gold 2.0

Inspiration

GOLD is the online course catalog and registration website for UCSB students and... it kinda sucks. Information is segmented between different pages which makes it hard to plan schedules for the present and the future. We wanted to change that.

What it does

We built a chrome extension which takes all the information about a class, usually split between different pages, and displays it all on the list of classes.

How we built it

We used Javascript inside the chrome extension to manipulate the various pages on which the course information was shown. When a user requests certain information, the extension fetches the webpage in the background and displays the relevant information from that page without loading a new page.

Challenges we ran into

We faced several issues throughout the project, mostly in trying to reveal a lot of the obscurity in how the GOLD website operates. One of the first was in trying to send a form to the server to get back the data we needed but without the user's webpage reloading. Alongside this was an issue where the page we got back from the server when we submitted the form through Ajax appeared to be different than the page that loaded when the user would just click on the link to the page. It turns out this was just due to obscurity in the location of the content on the webpage and we were soon back on track. The second large issue was the presence of Javascript buttons in the content we were injecting into the page, which when placed inside the page for two different classes, would interfere with each other's operations. We had to do some reformulation of the design and the exact operation of the extension and in the end got it working in a different way than how we had originally planned.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the fact that we were able to improve the experience our fellow UCSB students will have when registering for and viewing classes. This is the first time working in-depth with Javascript for all of us so we're also proud of all we were able to do in such a short time.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how GOLD operates, both in displaying content and fetching pages. We also learned how Javascript, and JQuery with it, can be used to manipulate those features and use them to customize the website as we see fit.

What's next for Gold 2.0

We have a lofty vision for the future of this project and it's hard to choose where to start. We're looking towards customizing the extension to the user's major and remaining graduation requirements, improving the look and feel of the extension, and much more. The brainstorming for this one still hasn't stopped among our team.