Inspiration Two months ago around my birthday I had received a lot of birthday cards and really wanted to come up with an idea where I could store them online and as well share them with my family. At the time we knew about the context.io app challenge. We decided to extend the tool to not only focus on birthday cards, but images that you'd like to share with others or for your own privacy.
What it does
The Collagist is a web application for sharing, creating, reliving events of your life. It’s essentially a tool that allows you to download your images from your email for your personal use or share it with friends. This application integrates Context.io by fetching and parsing through an individual's email to collect and download images to a personal account created on The Collagist.
Key Features
1) Registration is a simple process.
To register you have to login into your email account beforehand. Once you are logged in, simply go to the registration page and type in corresponding email address along with a secure password of any kind (doesn’t have to be email account password).
After a successful registration, simply select your desired folders for view and downloading images. The system will scan through the first 25 emails. Webhooks will be used later for reading and parsing newer messages.
2) Select the images you’d like for tagging to themes.
Themes is a formal way for sorting and tagging a user images. These themes are then used to create collages that can be shared or kept to themselves.
Sharing with friends is an option allows our program to be versatile for both personal and social outlets. With a sharing options the limits on what this program can be utilized for are endless.
If a user doesn’t want to share their themes with no one, then he/she can. The site is versatile tailoring to all needs. As of now the program is only geared towards images, but if the idea seems to be popular we can innovate and look into messages.
How I built it
Context.io PHP 2.0 library JQuery HTML5 JavaScript Database – MySQL Server
Challenges I ran into
A lot of coding with a small team. We ran into several challenges such as database inserts,updates, deletes Ajax running on web pages
These challenges took a while but resolved
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
My first hackathon and I'm proud of my team's effort. A lot of late nights but we wanted to finish this great idea.
What I learned
A lot about web development, sychronizing such as updating database when a user makes a key change, creating a seemless process. We can always grow in this aspect, but we are proud of the effort and not giving up.
What's next for The Collagist
1) In creating this program we hoped to resolve a problem of storing memories in the form of cards, electronically. This is initially how the idea started but grew into a really cool web app for social media. We'd like to look into e-cards and how we can merge the 2 platforms together. 2) Improve the interface and design (also, extend as a mobile application) 3) Add more collage designs (create more templates for showcasing images) 4) Showcase it to local radios, small businesses, group of friends. They all would love something like this.
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