Cosmic Notes | Devpost

Inspiration

Since the hackathon was open-ended, we decided to create a blog centered around astronomy after being inspired by the name of the hackathon. We had an interest in astronomy and wanted to use this project to expand upon it.

What it does

Cosmic Notes is a blog that a group of high students (us) created to share their interest in astronomy with others. It includes an About page, Home page, and Blogs page.

How we built it

We first found a few tutorials on YouTube for websites and blogs and used them to come up with the layout of our blog. We also looked back at our old projects, some of which were websites, to remember how to code and stylize certain things. We then used Javascript to make what we could functional, and finally, CSS to stylize the blog. We ended up moving things around and added an About page near the end.

Challenges we ran into

The two biggest obstacles we ran into while coding the blog were making sure the Javascript worked across all the HTML files and centering the text in the navigation bar. Every few hours of adding new code, specific HTML pages like the "About" page would stop having access to our Javascript code. This caused our dropdown and search menu to stop functioning. Similarly, the spacing in the navigation bar kept varying between the HTML files, which was extremely frustrating.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We accomplished many things while creating Cosmic Notes. Past websites our members have worked on have been scuffed and unprofessional-looking. With Cosmic Notes, we ended up with a product that is sleek and smooth to navigate. For example, despite all the issues we had with the formatting, the navigation has uniform spacing across every page on our blog. Another accomplishment we are proud of is containing the article's title and information, the date and time it takes to read, within the transparent boxes. We had issues with the transparent box not being contained in its space as well, but we managed to resolve them.

What we learned

We learned some new facts about astronomy while working on this project! We also learned how to do more new and complex things with Javascript and improve our debugging skills. due to the numerous errors we ran into (unfortunately).

What's next for Cosmic Notes

For one, we want to make sure the search feature is functional. We'd also want to improve the look of the About page and work on organizing the posts into different categories, along with allowing readers to comment on the posts. We would also like to include an AI feature for our blog, maybe a chat bot that could answer space-related questions or update you on recent astrological news.