Slug Share

Login to Website
Main Feed
Users can create a new post
Posts are filtered by category
User's About page

What it does

Slug Share is a website to advocate for justice, transparency, and community building here at UCSC. With our website, students can create an account, login, and post on our main feed. Posts are filtered under Petitions, Events, and Share Requests. Petitions contain petitions and causes related to UCSC that students can support and interact with to promote justice. The events tab contains upcoming events that students can register for and attend, making these opportunities more accessible. The About Page has information about the user, their recent activity, their interests, and contact information. The Share Requests tab contains requests that UCSC students have made for items or favors that other students can respond to. This allows people to access the things they need, promoting equity and community-building. Finally, the sign out tab logs users out and takes them back to the landing page. There is also an about page for the existing user that contains the events they attended or are interested in and information about them.

Inspiration

The UC system wide graduate student strike inspired us to make a website that advocates justice across campus. We observed the need for a platform where students can be socially and ethically more involved in their university and community. There are endless messages on our floor’s group chat asking for help or requesting to borrow items. We thought it would be useful to have a nextdoor.com type of social media for university students to ask for help, browse school events, and sign petitions. We wanted to increase equity across the campus and provide opportunities for people who don’t have access to the same to still get help.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build our website. We learned how to use a new IDE called WebStorm and used GitHub to collaborate on the project.

Challenges we ran into

When choosing a project, we didn’t know what the limits of our skill set would be. We spent the first few hours of the hackathon experimenting with Twilio, hoping to use it for messaging between users. We spent too much time on it without making much progress and decided to build our project without it. We later explored and researched PHP databases but were advised by a mentor that it may be more actionable to use HTML and CSS to build a working login page. One of the main challenges was getting our filter buttons to work, but we persevered and used different methods to make that feature work. We referenced numerous YouTube tutorials, W3Schools.com, and the very kind and helpful mentors to debug and learn JavaScript.

We all had minimal experience using Git and had a bumpy start working together, running into many merge conflicts that we didn’t know how to deal with properly. Half of us learned how to use Git for the first time at the Intro to Git Workshop!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Particular parts of our website that we are proud of are the login page and implementing a filter for the blog posts. We are beginner programmers and were not familiar with HTML, CSS, or Javascript before this hackathon. So, we are proud that we learned enough of each language to properly implement it for our website. Above all, we are extremely proud of ourselves for working countless hours on this project, completing it, and persevering through the plethora of challenges that we encountered while creating our project.

What we learned

Our team consists of all beginners. We had no experience with HTML, CSS, or Javascript and most of us had never used Webstorm (the IDE we used) and Github before. However, by attending workshops, doing copious amounts of research, consulting the mentors, and discussing with each other, we made significant strides. By the end, we learned how to create a login page, filter posts under certain categories, add a new user-generated post to our feed, style our pages, link different pages together, etc. We are committed to learning and improving our skills but we now proudly claim that we are familiar with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

What's next for Slug Share

In the near future, we also hope to be able to add a feature that geo-tags all the events, petitions, and item requests so users can see what requests are closest to them. We were trying to display points by residential colleges. Furthermore, we wanted to establish a positive point system to incentivize students with a weekly leaderboard to people who have been involved in their environment. We also hope to have more events and users on the site. We hope for Slug Share to be a common place at all universities.