Inspiration: Information about Columbia can sometimes be difficult to find. Whether we want to find out about campus events, or we just want to see what's on the menu at Ferris, it can be frustrating to have to scour the internet and go to multiple websites just to find out what's happening today. Therefore, we knew right away that we wanted to create a dashboard that combines all key info about campus life right now: dining hall menus, campus news from the Daily Spectator and the Barnard Bulletin, the current weather, and upcoming events. All in one place!
What it does: Our website scrapes the Columba Dining, Daily Spectator, Barnard Bulletin, and Columbia events pages to put together a dashboard with all of the most relevant data, providing links to today's events and news articles and using a Weather API to give the most updated weather report for NYC.
How we built it: We used Github pages and a Github actions pipline to continually build/display the website, allowing us to test modularly as we went. We used VSCode to write a React app using mainly JavaScript and edited the appearance using CSS!
Challenges we ran into: We particularly struggled with scraping Spectator, for which there was no API or widget embed, and developing a method for not needing to scrape every request, but instead to automating scraping each day and simply populating the page with the scraped info.
Accomplishments that we're proud of: We're proud of building something that worked at our first Hackathon! We're also proud of scraping Columbia dining and Columbia Spectator in order to populate the most recent info to the page. Finally, we're proud of employing a server and scripts to automatically scrape Spec every morning.
What we learned: We learned a lot about react, web dev, APIs, and webscraping.
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