PioneerStudents
https://github.com/BuiltInParris/PioneerStudnets
A website for Tinashe Tapera, designed to connect prospective students with current students from their hometown.
Created and designed by Alex Marion and Stevie Parris.
OBJECTIVES:
Our objective in creating Pioneer Students was to create an intuitive platform to connect international students on a global level. We aimed to design a clean user experience which would give international students a sense of a university from another student's perspective without having to travel. This website organizes and connects students from different countries to different universities, with the ability to search from a country of origin or a destination school. Once the user has found their query, they can read distributors blogs and view blog posts and images from their peers.
IMPLIMENTATION:
Our project was created in NodeJS which is used as a foundation for our services and libraries. The site is written in jade, java-script, css, bash, and html. To acheive our goals we implimented several different web services, libraries and API's. Breaking our website into different portions of functionality we generated a list of useful services which we implimented step by step to create functionality in our site.
Mapping Libraries:
- D3 Maps
- Natural Earth
- Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL)
- Topojson
- mapshaper.org
UI:
- Bootstrap
Security:
- Passport
- Bcrypt
Data and Storage:
- MongoDB
API's:
- Google Geocoder
Blogging:
- Ghost Blogs
Our mapping libraries were the first to be implimented and we combined them to create a landing page map which shows existing distributors and links to their blogs. Our choice of Bootstrap allows us to dynamically resize our web page and allows for mobile integration as well. Our site uses Passport's services to create a database (MongoDB) of users and passwords, which bcrypt then encrypts. Our page also has an administator panel in which new users can be created, new admins created, and users can be deleted. Using passports authentification these pages are only available to administrators. Finally, each time a user is created a Ghost Blog is generated and then populated by the user. We have also created a mobile app which spawns a web view and displays our website. We chose to use Bootstrap not only for its web properties but also for its mobile properties. Our site flows seemlessly from desktop to mobile and using this simple application all functionality is available on android devices. Along with our site and mobile application we have also generated our own web service. Currently the web service allows the return of all users in the United States, but it could very easily be expanded to other countries as well. The web service returns a json document with all users username, city, university, description, and a link to their image. This web service is useful for those attempting to find information about the bloggers on Pioneer Students.
RESULTS:
While Pioneer Students isn't full functionality (search isn't implimented, and it only works in the US currently), and more work is required to optimize image uploading as well as window resizing of the map. Considering the time frame we have accomplished a lot. We created boiler plate code to create a multi blog platform from a single website. This was then integrated with the addition and removal of points on a world map. This data was then corrilated with user creation and deletion, and those pages were placed behind security measures. We also have the ability to scale, zoom, and link on a map. While our to-do list is long and the project is not up to full functionality, we believe that we have shown here not only our ability to impliment a succesfull design for web and mobile but also have shown that our project has promise to continue in the future.