UW Madison Club Social Aggregate

Inspiration

There are hundreds of clubs Madison, and it can be tough to find one that suits you. To learn about different clubs you have to either go to club meetings, or individually browse all their social medias. Weren't impressed by https://win.wisc.edu/organizations, as it doesn't show what the clubs were really about. Social media posts better reflect the clubs atmosphere.

What it does

Our site aggregates the Instagram posts of all organizations listed on https://win.wisc.edu/organizations. It allows for filtering of Instagram posts by organization category, narrowing your club search. It also allows for sorting by post date and by club name.

How we built it

We used BeautifulSoup and Selenium to scrape social handles from https://win.wisc.edu/organizations, and their respective instagram posts. We then used a Java Spring framework to build up our backend, which served data to a python webserver frontend.

Challenges we ran into

We spent a lot of time troubleshoot images not loading on our site. We figured it was a CORS issue, where images do not load properly if they are not served from the correct host. Even in our finished project, images still load slowly, but they do (usually) fully load.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We think our front end looks pretty good. We believe we have made a practical website that can legitimately help students find the clubs meant for them.

What we learned

Never mess with ChatGPT, it produces completely unreadable, un-debuggable code. We also learned how to webscrape from sites like Instagram that implement security measures and obfuscate their data. For the frontend, we learned how to interface between different languages with serialization, and HTTP.

What's next for UW Madison Club Social Aggregate

bed.

.... First, we would like to cleanup the code base. There are some absolute paths in our code, and we would like to setup a Docker image which can run the server. We would like to fully integrate all of the organizations socials. We only had time to put in Instagram posts, but we would like to include Facebook, twitter, and the organizations own external websites. We also considered implementation authentication for users so they can follow clubs/club categories that they are interested in.