Rebirth Textbooks

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  Our logo! (home screen)

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  Information on a book

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  Viewable book list

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  Add book to donate

Inspiration

We thought about how students sometimes cannot afford to buy or rent textbooks, and how, after a course is completed, students often do not need their textbooks. We wanted to create a way to combat both of these problems, so we made Rebirth Textbooks. Our website was made to make it easier and cheaper for students to acquire the textbooks they need, while also giving them a chance to donate their old books to other students.

What It Does

This website was created by students to help students! It allows people to post about any textbooks that they want to donate, and they can leave their information so other people can reach out to them if they want to claim the book. It also allows students to look through the listed books and find one they need. If they want it, they can use the donor's information to contact them and find a way to collect the book.

How We Built It

We set up the website itself through EJS pages (ie. welcome, add_books). Then, we designed these pages further using CSS stylesheets. The EJS pages interacted with a database, sending information and receiving information back using SQL queries. The database served as a home for different books to be donated. Outside of using Javascript to handle user input, we used it to display the results of queries on the web pages.

Challenges We Ran Into

We had issues connecting the pages using EJS since it required a different syntax than HTML. However, we were able to use the Javascript file to contact the EJS pages, along with our SQL information, which allowed our webpage to work. We also had issues making the search bar since we had to monitor and delete the searches that users were not looking for.

Accomplishments That We're Proud of

We’re proud of learning so many new technologies and applying them to the project in such a short amount of time. We’re also proud of creating a charity website that can one day help students save money and give back to those in need.

What We Learned

We learned how to have user input edit a website through Javascript. These edits were not temporary changes that would disappear after navigating out of the page but saved edits to a database. We also learned how to then take the information from the database and display it to the user through SQL. We were also inexperienced with EJS and were able to gain a much better understanding of it by displaying our query results.

What's Next for Rebirth Textbooks

We want to implement a login system, which would allow for more privacy and safety for the users. We also want to allow people to delete their own posts once the book has been claimed, and we hope to make this website accessible to more students.

Built With

• css
• ejs
• javascript
• sql