Sunset

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  Creating a Community

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  Blurred image before Sunset

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  Image post Sunset

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  Our Login Page

Inspiration

As first years in college we've recently felt the effects of friends going to other colleges and having to travel far from family. This inspired us to create Sunset, a way to maintain these connections regardless of distance.

What it does

Sunset is a unique photo sharing experience that allows users to join communities and send photos that will be blurred until that chats Sunset, at which time the photos will be unblurred.

How we built it

Using a Python Flask API, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Web Sockets we created a login page and a sidebar with multiple chat rooms. From our main menu, users can create or join communities in which they can chat and share photos which will be blurred until Sunset.

Challenges we ran into

Understanding and getting the Flask API and WebSockets to communicate with each other was challenging at first, but once we learned to send and receive messages between the two we were able to get the chats working with no problem.

Another major challenge was updating the databases, as the database doesn't let one change it manually, as you need to go through flask and multiple variables to actually manipulate the database.

Lastly, making images appear in chat rooms where users joined later was difficult as we hadn't accounted for rendering past images like we did with sending past messages from the chat history.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a fully working and stylized chat room was something we thought would be too difficult for us to understand and do, but now that we've done it we can't wait to apply it in future hackathons and projects.

Furthermore, being able to integrate our different parts together was something we thought would be insurmountable but was ultimately something we overcame by ensuring our inputs and outputs were consistent so that all the systems, including the html pages, API routes, and JavaScript file worked in unison

What we learned

We expanded our ability to use HTML and CSS to the point where now we feel confident we can stylize a webpage without google or the internet. Furthermore being able to create a fully functionally Flask + WebSocket API gave us knowledge in how API's communicate and tell each other when to do what

What's next for Sunset

Eventually, we'd like to give users the ability to comment or react to specific photos. We also want to implement a search feature so that users can search for communities that interest them, as well as grant them, the ability to customize their communities by changing the background image and UI elements.

Built With

• css
• flask
• html
• javascript
• jswebsocket
• python
• sqlalchemy