Inspiration

This was our first Hackathon, web design and cloud computing were new for all of us so we decided to build something in that vein. From the theme of connecting and exploring the outdoors and the personal experiences of daily walks during lockdown we decided to build a website which would help suggest or find local walks in nature.

What it does

Our site takes your location or an inputted location, searches a stored list of walks and returns the nearest walk to the location displayed on a map.

How I built it

First we got started with flask and built a simple website that could display a map. We then found a site which contained walks through British nature in the form of XML files. These contained coordinates which described the route, we built a web scraper to download each file on the site and extract the coordinates. GeoJson was then used to plot a route of lines between each set of coordinates. We also worked on getting the site hosted onto Google Cloud, as well as aquiring a domain name and getting that domain to point to the domain given by Google Cloud. Later we added functionality onto the site with functionality to input a custom location.

Challenges I ran into

Our initial idea was to look at the local area and suggest a walk using Google directions API. After working on this for a while we had trouble finding a suitable route as the directions API makes a route from A to B, and we would have needed to find a way to make a route resembling a polygon A to B to C to A which at minimum needed to be a triangle. This proved difficult in the time frame we had as well as difficulty identifying using Google places which locations were the green spaces that we desired. Our solution was finding a website containing numerous walks and instead recommending and displaying the closest one.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I believe the whole team did something new while completing the project and we're happy to have a functioning website that can be visited and perform a task.

What I learned

We learned about the process of deploying a website from local development to Google cloud and domain names. Learnt how to use Google cloud and Google maps APIs.