ToToroTravel

ToToroTravel homepage

Inspiration

In the movie My Neighbor Totoro, Totoro is an adorable, large, furry creature and the friendly king of the forest. 10-year-old Satsuki and 4-year-old Mei hold on to Totoro and exclaim in delight as Totoro flies high up in the air and over their town. We were inspired by the joy Totoro and his flying brought to Satsuki and Mei, so we created a website related to travel, ToToroTravel.

What it does

ToToroTravel is a website users can use to help plan their vacations. On ToToroTravel's homepage, there is a section with popular destinations and a section with popular attractions along with a city search bar and a key term (e.g. boba) search bar. The website allows users to input a city name, and the website will return a list of the top 5 businesses (e.g. restaurants), top 5 hotels, and top 5 attractions in the city based on their Yelp rating. The result display includes the business/hotel/attraction name with a hyperlink, an image from the business, and its rating on Yelp. Users may also input both a city name and a key term (e.g. boba). If both entries are included, the website will display the top 5 businesses, top 5 hotels, and top 5 attractions that are related to that key term.

How we built it

To start off, we decided to incorporate a Yelp Fusion API into our program, to help users find nearby food places, hotels, attractions, etc. In order to do this, we started by writing a Python program to retrieve the data from the Yelp Fusion API, and then upload it to a local server using FastAPI. From there, we implemented a JavaScript program to pull the data from the local server, bypassing Yelp's Cross Origin Resource Sharing policy (CORS). After successfully retrieving the data, we were able to use the JavaScript program as a middle ground between the Python program and our front-end HTML website. The HTML website takes input in a search bar from users which is then passed to the back-end program for siphoning. The top 5 rated results are returned to the front-end which gets formatted with beauty by our JSS file.

Challenges we ran into

When merging our changes in Git, many of our changes were overridden when different teammates merged. In particular, our styling properties were overridden multiple times. We had to look at our commit history to recover different changes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a friendly-looking website that can make users feel happier when they see it, and we love our hand-drawn logos, especially our drawings of Totoro and his friends. We are very happy that we were able to successfully access an API and format its results in order to help users plan vacations.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the syntax of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and learned how to access an API and format its results. In addition, we strengthened our teamwork as we worked through challenges together to create a product composed of many different elements!