Rank It!

Rank It!

Inspiration

We've all checked the Amazon reviews of a product before buying, its an essential to internet shopping. Sites like Yelp are well known for their restaurant and landmark reviews.

But, is anyone reviewing the review sites, or the websites without any reliable information on the internet? It's no longer safe just to assume websites are legitimate because of their domain name, or professional design. The internet media industry has spent a fortune protecting the consumer from "fake news" and phishing scams, and we believe our team has developed a solution where the average user can protect themselves, with no cost to the any of the companies we represent.

What it does

"Rank It" is a chrome extension for rating websites, with a voting system borrowed from the social media giant Reddit. "Up Votes" and "Down Votes" serve to voice a singular user's likes or dislikes about a sub domain, and the most popular websites of the (week, month, year, or all time..) are ranked by their total score set by the internet's consumers. Thus implementing a social media aspect, and encourages websites to develop a better user experience to gain more popularity.

How we built it

Our team developed a mysql database to store website urls, their "rating", and wrote php scripts to interface with our javascript front-end. Then developed a Browser Action through Google Chrome's extensions api, which showed a pop-up allowing a user to vote on a website, and view a site's score. Soon after we created an interface between the database and the extension's badge (the little number on the icon),relaying the url and score back and forth. The finishing touches included UI improvements and a (temporarily) local-hosted website displaying the websites ranked in order of popularity.

Challenges we ran into

-None of us had developed a chrome extension before, and two developers on our team had never even touched Javascript! -Chrome Extensions lacked a lot of support, and nearly every question we searched didn't have an answer. -Interfacing PHP and Javascript, although not uncommon, gave us a lot of trouble. -Badges on the icon seemed to be the biggest challenge, but that only made us want to solve it more!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

-It Works! -We created our first chrome extension, with a working interface with a server we set up, and implemented badges on the icon!

What we learned

-We all learned a ton about Javascript, especially the two team members who had never approached it before. -We became extremely familiar with the Google Extensions API. -How to properly manage time. -How to hack! -How to have fun, and still perform under stress.

What's next for Rank It!

-Advanced website functionality. -Scaleable Database Support -Browser Fingerprinting and Identification -Marketing

Built With

Submitted to

RevolutionUC

Created by

I wrote the Javascript to interface with Connor's back-end scripts and server. I also designed and wrote the Browser Action Chrome Extension.

BryanLikesToProgram Racic
Assisted with design especially front-end. Used Javascript to implement a Badge Text on the chrome extension. That read data from the database and displayed the current "rate" of the current website on screen.

Brad
Designed the front page and aided in analysis and design.

WillTaylor2352
I designed and implemented the back end. The back end consists of a MySQL database with a php webservice to allow our extension to interact with the database. After the database and web service was set up, I implemented the AJAX calls to interact with the web service. I also implemented the php that allows the home page to get the top pages in the database. This was my first time making my own web service and making an extension. The web service was probably the most challenging part, but the differences in the normal sites and extensions was quite difficult to get around as well.

Connor Tellep