Inspiration
A mutual friend revealed that a recent trip she took to Japan was influenced by YouTuber Mikey Chen (a.k.a. Strictly Dumpling). At a loss for ideas, she messaged him out of the blue ... and surprisingly enough, he responded!
Now, not everyone is lucky enough to have a famous influencer's personal input on their vacation plan. At the same time, the average traveler spends a ton of time picking at the details. As the trip progresses, those who are documenting it may be overwhelmed by their organizational woes.
Enter Itinerare.
What it does
Itinerare is a platform for sharing and creating itineraries.
The Itinerare community is a social marketplace whereby previous and current travellers may share their experiences. On the community page, the user may "like" others' itineraries, and featured itineraries are blog-like posts which detail an experience generally well-received by the public.
Each itinerary is a sequence of daily plans, complete with activities, restaurants, and hotels/homestays. When crafting the user's plan, suggestions are supplied based on the user's specified parameters: i.e., price and locale. The system offers what others have done at the user's current location.
How we built it
This project was built using Express.js with MongoDB. We also used the Bulma CSS framework for some of our UI components. The content is written in a mixture of Jade and HTML.
The login and authentication system functionality lives in the Passport.js library and the passwords are encrypted, thanks to bcryptjs.
Multer provides each user with the ability to choose a profile picture.
Challenges we ran into.
- Conditionally displayed content (e.g., the logout button)
- Open (blocking) issues with other libraries, e.g., Riot.js
- Unfamiliarity with DB/frontend communication through Express.js HTTP request/response handlers.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Having created a minimum viable product which does the majority of what we aimed to do, and having something to show for, despite being a two-person team.
What we learned
We learned how to create an application that runs Express.js with MongoDB on the backend and uses combination of Jade with HTML on the frontend. Alongside, we had to research and adjust our app towards the constraints relating to communication between the ends of the project. While experimenting different solutions, we got to learn how to setup Angular and Riot.js projects, use Handlebars for html logic, and bootstrap as the main CSS framework.
What's next for Itinerare
Ultimately the future of Itinerare is to adhere to personalization. Itinerare is a simplistic travel tool that needs to be tailored to fit people's preferences. Creating a SMS system to transfer vouchers among customers and companies/people would reduce the need for paper, as well, provide convenience for both parties. Itinerare will also require more APIs to provide more data model training to personalize suggestions of places to go and eat at these destinations. As well, adjusting the UI to tailor to the itinerary would create a more enjoyable, and friendly experience. Pivoting on these three points would be beneficial to creating a more simplistic, faster and enjoyable way to travel.
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