from the past 2 years of Covid, we were inspired by our experience as individuals, students, and communities to create Covid Connoissuer
What it does
Covid Connoissuer is an information consolidating website that provides users with a single website that provides relevant Covid information, from restaurant services to test kit availability
How we built it
we used python for back end programming and html for front end design
to extract information, we used APIs and web scrapers to find relevant information on websites
Challenges we ran into
a lot of the websites we originally wanted to include required permission to access their developer tools, which would take time to approve
instead, we had to manually code web scrapers to extract information from the website's inspect code
however, many of these websites have security that detects scraper bots, making it very difficult to extract information without access to the actual APIs
Accomplishments that we're proud of
with all of us starting with zero to little background in web scraping, we were all very proud to have coded our own algorithm and figuring out how to navigate the inspect code of the website
all of us had very little experience with html as well, so we were also very happy with the designs that we were able to implement and are excited about further polishing our design
What we learned
we learned about APIs, web scraping, connecting front end and back end services with Flask, html, and graphQL
What's next for Covid Connoisseurs
with what little time we had for our project, we were unable to fully implement everything we originally envisioned
for our next steps, we have already applied to multiple developer tools for websites we wanted to scrape, so if/when we are granted permission for these APIs, we plan to implement more functions to scrape information for our website
furthermore, with these tools, it will be much easier for us to implement location based information services that allow users to input an address or brand name
for the website, we are interested in adding more aesthetic features and improve formatting so that users can navigate through information easier
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