Inspiration
One existing website, FutureMe, allows users to send emails to their future selves. Optionally, users can have their emails publicly visible to all other users of the website. We recognized a therapeutic side to this: there's something reassuring about reading about other people's lives - it reminds us that we're never struggling alone. Conversely, there's something liberating about sharing your unfiltered thoughts with the world. We thought we'd turn this concept into a designated, standalone app. It's not just a personal journal, it's our journal. j(our)nal.
What it does
j(our)nal is a community journal. It allows users to write, publish, and read journal entries anonymously. That's about it.
How we built it
This is a node.js web application. We used HTML, CSS, and JS, as well as Google Firebase to manage the journal entry data. We also hosted it using Google Firebase, although we ran into some issues while hosting. Credit to kunaal438 and their tutorial which we followed to learn the technologies https://dev.to/kunaal438/fullstack-how-to-create-a-working-blogging-website-with-pure-html-css-and-js-in-2021-9di)
Challenges we ran into
As mentioned above, hosting was quite difficult as none of us have used Firebase for hosting before. At the time of writing this, there's something going wrong with adding images, so we'll try to clear that up.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This was our first hackathon, and our first time making a Node.js app
What we learned
Aside from the above technologies, we learned a lot about managing time in a hackathon. Additionally, learning the benefits of Google Firebase opens a lot of doors for us in future endeavours.
What's next for j(our)nal
One idea that time did not permit was to 'BeReal'-ify the app. That is, users write a once-daily reflection, and can only view other's reflections once they've published their own.
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