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Go Local Extension
Go Local
Inspiration
In our current times with quarantine and lockdowns, local businesses are struggling to keep up. It seems like almost every other day, there is news of a local business closing down. In order to help these businesses in these dire times, we came up with an idea of a chrome extension that allows local businesses to advertise their goods/services to consumers.
What it does
Local businesses can submit their business to our database to be advertised. The database can pull information about the business and display it to the user. Users can filter by different categories (restaurants, retail, fitness) to determine what type of local business they would like to support. The app can also calculate the distances and show which local businesses are closest.
How we built it
We used a combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and ReactJS for the front end and NodeJS for the backend. We used a MongoDB database to pull information about the local businesses to display on the front end.
Challenges we ran into
None of our teammates were familiar with creating a chrome extension so it was difficult to learn it and explore what we could do with it. Coming up with an idea for our project was also a challenge as it was difficult to determine if the idea would be feasible for a hackathon and if it would be a good idea to present. Another challenge we ran into was one of our teammates was not able to stick with us for the entire hackathon, so we had to create the project with 3 people.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Having no experience with making a chrome extension, we are all proud of our ability to push our limits and build something no one had experience with. Another accomplishment that we are proud of is being able to put the database on the cloud as with things being online now, it is difficult to share a database locally.
What we learned
We learned how to build a chrome extension and create endpoints for our front end to call to.
What's next for Go Local
Getting more local businesses to sign up for our application to greatly expand our catalog and allow more to be discovered. We would also like to implement the ability for the app to automatically pop up when a keyword or website is entered. Another feature that could be implemented is a rating system that allows users to rate the best local businesses.
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