Inspiration
SeedLink was inspired by the challenge that small community gardeners often face when working on their projects. While there is a plethora of information available online, it can be difficult for home gardeners to build a community in person. In addition, gardening can be challenging to get into as a beginner. SeedLink seeks to solve these problems.
In addition, by encouraging home gardening, SeedLink will help combat the environmental challenges caused by mass commerical farming. The food in grocery stores is often shipped long distances, leading to pollution. In addition, many commercial farms use unsustainable practices that degrade soil quality, cause deforestation, exploit workers, and so on. By encouraging the use of small home gardens, SeedLink will reduce the reliance on this chain of production.
What it does
SeedLink is a platform for community gardeners to post what seeds, tools, or information they have, and what seeds, tools, or information they are looking for. Users can search other users' listings and contact them through email. Users can set up a rate of exchange on their own, but SeedLink does not encourage this. If users wish to trade seeds rather than buying or selling, they are welcome to do so.
In addition, SeedLink features a "Get Recommendations" tab, which supplies users with a list of plants that they could start growing right now, based on the time of year and their zipcode. This will help beginners figure out how to start.
How we built it
SeedLink is built on top of the Flask framework. All of the front end was written without a framework, in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. The backend was written in Python using Flask, and in addition, we used Beautifulsoup to webscrape a website for publicly available gardening data. Sisilia wrote most of the back end and the recommendations feature, while Kariessa and Joshua wrote most of the front end.
Challenges we ran into
As we were so unfamiliar with a lot of the technology we were using, we spent a lot of time reading documentation and going through tutorials. None of us were overly familiar with ways to connect frontend and backend, so we took the time to learn how to do this. We also had challenges coming up with an idea that would solve a need but was still doable in the allotted time, which required lots of time spent brainstorming ideas.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We created a dynamically generated catalog page (with popups!), which is reused as the search page. We were also able to successfully scrape a website to present useful data to the users.
What we learned
All of us learned new frameworks, ideas, and languages in order to create SeedLink. For Joshua, this was his first time working on a project with other people. He learned how to use GitHub, how to use the command line, and how to create web pages. Kariessa had never used Flask before; she learned how to create templated HTML files and connect the back end and front end of an application. Sisilia learned how to initialize a Flask application, handle user authentication, and create and update a database.
What's next for SeedLink
When programming SeedLink, the user interface was not at the top of our priorities. We would like to improve the website's design and make it more intuitive to use. In addition, we would like to add a feature where the user can click on recommendations in order to search the catalog for nearby users offering those seeds, without having to run the search themselves.
Once we start testing SeedLink among a wider audience, we would also update the FAQ page with their questions.
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