Charify | Devpost

Inspiration

We decided to create this project after realizing the risks that many less-wealthy people face during the pandemic and provided a solution for people to donate to the charities that help the less-wealthy people the most.

What it does

The application provides users with the highest-ranked charity based on the percentage of their revenue that they use to support their mission of providing services to less-wealthy people.

How we built it

We first used Python, Pandas, and Beautiful-Soup to web scrape and store it to then import it to a local MySQL database. We then used PHP to read the data from the table and displayed it on another table on the website. We also incorporated a few features such as searching for a certain charity by name, link, or percentage and creating multiple pages for the website so that it wasn't too overcrowded.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges. Firstly, we were still planning out how to acquire the scrape the data from a website and we ran into challenges such as low efficiency and some difficulties with this complex topic. Secondly, we were debating how to import the data to a database(e.g., MySQL) to use for the website. We were initially thinking of using a remote MySQL server but because that was new to both of us, we aborted that idea. We thought of an idea to have Zefeng download the CSV file that contained all the data from the charity website and import it into his local database to use for the website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to learn and use web scraping with Python, Pandas, and Beautiful-Soup to pull the majority of the charity data from link. We were then able to manipulate and display that data on the server and include some other features to go with it.

We were able to finish the project with time to spare and our collaboration ran smoothly.

What we learned

From this experience, we learned how to collaborate with each other, our greatest strengths/weaknesses in programming, and techniques such as web scraping and various features for a website.