Today @ Princeton

Princeton students check the same websites every single day. We compiled data from these sources into a sleek new tab dashboard so that the most crucial information is always right at your fingertips.

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Inspiration

Weather, Canvas, dining hall menus. Princeton students are always on the move, and there are a handful of websites that we all check every single day for crucial information. We wanted a way to make all of this daily information accessible from the moment you open your computer browser. With 5,000 undergraduates and ten links that we all need to check, our hack will save over 50,000 google searches every day!

What it does

Today at Princeton is a new tab page that compiles the most crucial information that you need to get through your day. It does the hard work and retrieves all this data and saves you 10 google searches a day minimum, guaranteed. We feature four widgets atop a beautiful background and daily greeting: weather, dining hall menus, featured prince articles, and quick links. All our data is live and refreshes hourly.

How we built it

We started by creating a data scraping script that gathers information about weather, dhall menus, etc., which we set to run hourly using a GitHub workflow. The results are saved in a MongoDB database and are retrieved by a Flask backend. The backend passes the data along to the React frontend, which renders the information as interactive widgets.

Challenges we ran into

We spent a lot of time perfecting the data scraping mechanism so that information is always up to date. We also spent a lot of time designing the interface so that it looks good enough for people to actually set as their new tab page.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of getting our final product to look exactly like our Figma mockups, nailing the look and feel. We are also proud of completing all four widgets and overcoming the challenges of working with such varied data.

What we learned

We learned about creating fully-connected, three-tiered applications, web scraping, and how to work with MongoDB. This project helped us gain experience in React and Python, as well as creating workflows to keep data up to date.

What's next for Today @ Princeton

We are currently awaiting approval to become an official chrome extension in the chrome web store, so our hackathon submission is just a website for now! We will get it turned into an extension so students can open Today @ Princeton as a new tab page, and we will send it out to the student body.

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