Webstagram

Inspiration: A lot of creative professionals have instagram profiles where they display their work, but instagram is not the best place for them to have a presence on the web. Since most of these users would not have the technical skills to build a website, Webstagram helps them creates a simple 3 page static site in HTML, CSS and JavaScript that they can simply add to a hosting service to get their website live. Webstagram basically generates the responsive site using the TOP 9 posts (or any other number) of the user. Popularity is the sum of number of likes and comments.

All of this happens under 5 minutes!

How we built it: We wrote a static site generator from scratch using jinja in Python that generates html, css and js files from data scrapped from Instagram. We also developed the front end in React JS to get user input and connected it with our backend in Python. We also built html themes from scratch that are responsive.

What we learnt: We learnt a lot about connecting different technologies in a tech stack. Our main learning was in developing an iNTUitive user interface and writing templates that can be rendered dynamically using Python.

Challenges faced: The API we used to scrape did not allow us to name files in the way we want. Thus, we had to deal with the os module in python to rename files according to our preferences. We also faced a big challenge while connecting our frontend to our backend, which we solved by using JSON as an intermediate format to exchange the data.

A static site generator that uses an Instagram Profile as a starting point to create a static website in HTML, CSS and JS.

The front