Inspiration -
After viewing Firebase's online earthquake database, we were inspired to create a project that gives people a better sense of the information as well providing them with opportunities to assist with long-term and short-term disaster relief.
What it does
Our project has several features - our homepage visualizes all earthquakes that happened within the past year. Earthquake color, radius, and opacity change depending on the earthquake's magnitude and how long ago it occurred. Users can also click on the "Take Me Here" button to see a Google Street View of the area at the epicenter of the earthquake.
The Quakes near me page allows users to find earthquakes relatively close to their area. Entering their longitude and latitude into the page will generate a map that centers on their location, and shows, in red, the earthquakes nearest to their location.
Clicking on the Help Out page links users to information about the app and ways they can help organizations, like the red cross, with disaster relief.
How we built it
We relied on firebase's open earthquake dataset and their sample code (which uses a google maps api) to create our project. We modified their basic earthquake map to make a more interactive and informational homepage, and to create an "earthquake locator" on our quakes near me page. The entire page was built using bootstrap to give our html/css a cleaner look. Our "Help Out" page also features a Twitter Widget, which features the Red Cross' Twitter feed. All interactive features of the page were built using java script, and we used many features of the Google Maps API.
Challenges we ran into
Many. The interactive map could be quite tricky at times, and the css required quite a bit of fiddling to get the look we wanted.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The whole thing! Our website is fully responsive, and uses many interesting features of the google maps API with great effect (which we had never used before).
What we learned
Although we did not end up launching our site with amazon web service, we set up a virtual machine using ubuntu and nginx that could be launched with a secure certificate should we decide to later purchase a domain name. We learned a lot about API's, web design, and utilizing data sets.
What's next for Poseidon
More links, more information, and more ways to help out! Also, a platform that connects groups to a variety of organizations that need volunteers.
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