JournalShare

Inspiration

This was inspired by the theme of whackathon, connection and wellness in a post-covid world. The pandemic brought on social isolation, and the inability to interact with people in a normal way hindered social and emotional development. Isolation from others exacerbated feelings of anxiety and depression. Our website addresses that isolation by creating a platform for people to share their thoughts and feelings with others, but also to just jot their thoughts down to relieve stress even if no one else sees it.

What it does

The website starts on a login page, where the user is prompted to give their username/email and password. From there, they can access either their past entries, interact with other posts, write their own entry, or access mental health resources available on the website. When they go to write their own entry, they are given a randomly generated prompt, but if they don't want to write about that prompt, they can click to generate a new one. Once they write an entry, they can categorize their entry into an emotion tag that is used to filter posts by emotion in the "Interact" page. Users can also upload a file from their own device as an entry. In the interact section, they can filter based on emotion (if they don't want to see certain posts) and read and comment on others entries. In the past entries section, they can view their own entries. In the resources page, there is a link to mental health resources in Massachusetts.

How we built it

We used an online collaborative coding editor called Replit to create a website, using HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and deployed it with Github pages.

Challenges we ran into

Although we had ambitious ideas to implement a chatbot, a filtering system based on emotion tags, and a voice recording feature, we were not able to implement these because we don't have the coding expertise. Moreover, we know how to create a website, but we can only work with local storage and cannot work with data in the back end. A large part of our website involved saving information and putting data on the website based on that data, so information on how to work with databases would improve our website significantly. We also had trouble simulating the website through Figma. We found it difficult to use and don't have experience in design.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of coming up with a final project together as a group, especially since all of us are beginner coders. We did a lot of research on our own to figure out how to code certain features and we are proud of learning a lot through this experience.

What we learned

We learned a lot about working as a team and about new languages and applications. A lot of topics were completely new to us, such as Figma and Flexbox in CSS. We were able to teach ourselves mostly through trial and error and lots of Googling. We were also able to share our thoughts through constant communication and discussions on what direction to take for our project.

What's next for JournalShare

We want to implement functionalities that we could not in our website. For example:

• Keep track of user information, entries, and activity through login -Organizing personal entries based on date, most to least interacted with, alphabetically by title, and importance
• Chatbot that provides emotional comfort and fast generalized advice
• Access to local mental health professionals -Implement filtering based on emotion tags
• Ability to fit content into emotion tag along with user’s manual selection
• More emotion tags -Add a guest feature, Can anonymously view posts
• Reporting feature: Ability to report unwanted and excessive content
• Integrate voice recording function: Can either speak or type when creating a journal entry, Transcribe audio that is spoken into microphone for easier use to combine text & audio and for accessibility

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• replit