Zot Zeus

Landing Page
Add a Club/Class
Add Club/Class Details

Inspiration

Zot Zeus was built to handle your needs in a virtual learning environment. With the addition of new information and virtual rooms to meet in, your bookmarks bar becomes easily cluttered with Zoom links, Piazza boards, and social media sites.

If you keep getting lost somewhere in your multiple layers of folders, don’t despair! Zot Zeus will make sure that you never lose a precious zoom link ever again. With customizable events and specifications for event times and social links, Zot Zeus helps you stay on top of your schedule and saves you precious time on finding your bookmarks (so you can spend a few extra minutes in bed before heading to class).

What it does

Zot Zeus is a website that allows a user to save all of their relevant links in one place. A user can add a club, organization, or class they are in, initializing it with the corresponding name, email, and meeting time for the club or class. Then, within each card, a user can add all relevant links specified with the corresponding title. For example, you can put in the Zoom link to a club or class meeting. The list of all relevant links will be displayed as cards, and all the links would be clickable to take you right to the respective website.

How We built it

This website was built using ZotHacks’s 2020 template. The code includes a mixture of JavaScript, Python, HTML, and CSS. We worked on the backend portion first to set up our database with Postman and MongoDB.

Challenges We ran into

Virtual Coding: Visual Studio Code was not pleased with being forced to share code online. We had to reconnect whenever a new file was being added, and sometimes files would not load. Additionally, VS Code sometimes raised errors that were false alarms.

JavaScript and HTML: We did not have lots of experience with using programming languages other than Python. Since the base of the project was written in these languages, we needed to adapt to the different coding languages, especially with brackets and curly braces.

Adapting Backend (Multiple Databases): We expanded upon the provided schema by adding a separate database for each event’s social links. For some time we were stuck on figuring out how to connect the database of the club/classes with the corresponding links and information for it. Since we didn’t have experience with databases, it was difficult to see how it could have been implemented, but we were able to solve the problem by better understanding the template code.

Formatting Frontend: Frontend formatting was a bit challenging to get used to. We wanted the smoothest user experience, which meant choosing our colors carefully (the fun part) and creating buttons, text sizing, and formatting our paragraphs to look better (the not so fun part). Github Repository: At the end, we had trouble uploading our project to a Github repository. Since we mainly worked via VS Code Live, we could only upload it through the computer it was hosted at. Thus, we were not able to show the progress we made on the code via Github pull requests.

Accomplishments that We are proud of

We’re proud to say we have finished this project without pulling an all-nighter and without the delicious food as fuel. We were able to set up our own database and learn how to work with it using the Schemas. There were also times when we successfully debugged together as a group and learned from our mistakes. It was satisfying to see our code run.

Please enjoy the beautiful Zot Zeus site and its crisp graphics, since that’s our biggest accomplishment!

What We learned

None of us had zero experience with web development prior to this hackathon. In the beginning, we were frustrated with not knowing where to start. However, once we began exploring the resources provided from this hackathon and asking for help, we pushed our limits and used what we learned about frontend and backend to create the best - and most useful - project that we will use.

What's next for Zot Zeus

Right now, all the information added is added to one database, so it is only fit for one user. In the future, we want to implement an account system where different users can use the program and add their own list of clubs/classes and links. Additionally, the user can only add new cards to their list, so users are expected to input the information right the first time. In the future, we want to give users a way to delete or update the information already inputted. We also would have liked to have made the graphics better with more personable backgrounds or have cards without the text bleeding outside the card.