watchOUT

watchOUT

Inspiration

The lack of a comprehensive yet simple event feed as well as the struggle of navigating through several websites (i.e. NYUAD portal, Orgsync, NYUAD website, etc.) in order to check ongoing events sparked our journey towards creating a calendar-integrated event feed that enables users to easily find upcoming events around campus.

What it does

Enables users to find and view upcoming campus events (i.e. SIG Events, Library Seminars, Art Center Events, etc.)
Add events to own google calendar
Provides both calendar-view & list-view of upcoming events

How we built it

Scraping through Selenium
Using JS, HTML, CSS to build website
Integrate google calendar API
Python scripts

Challenges we ran into

Passing data/scripts in varying programming languges
Navigating procedural environments that can handle user input
Scraping relevant data (i.e. event information) that is protected through security measures

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Scraping a comprehensive range of events that are available for the users to view
Providing both calendar and list view of events, allowing users to suit their own purpose
Integrating calendar API alongside functions that enable adding events to user's own calendars

What we learned

Web scraping
How to run python scripts through javascripts
Deploy web app through heroku
Using API

What's next for watchOUT

Adding categories for events
Allowing user login
Potential development of native mobile apps
Integrating within a larger community

Built With

Created by

I worked on the scraping of the websites, focusing more on the Student Portal which required a user login to access the data. I also standardized the formats after scrapping and assembled the final json file that was fed to the herokuapp. Helped in creating the downloadable ics calendar files for the mobile version.

oscargomezq
I primarily handled the integration of the group's code on the Heroku server. I'm new to server-side programming this semester, and this project went a long ways towards demystifying the cross-language possibilities. The JS splash page runs python functions that scrape websites, compiling them all into sorted JSON, to populate a Google calendar through their API, then that data goes back out through pug-templated HTML to the final polished app page. Whew! Quite a bit to wrap our heads around in 24 hours. An invaluable crash-course to the true power of the web.

Tavius Koktavy
Immersive Artist - Cyberspace Dev - Sunset Creator
I worked on scraping data using python scripts and writing this data to a json file. The biggest challenge was discovering the channels through which the websites passed information so that we could extract relevant data. I then worked on formatting the data and storing it into an iCal format. I also worked on the method to download the iCal file once it was generated.

Navya Suri
Brian Shin