All Together

Hackathon-style content creation community

Comment

Inspiration

As someone that likes to watch cooking competitions and participate in Hackathons, I wanted to combine the two and bring it to content creation!

In these events, we are given limited time and sometimes, resources to work with. During past Hackathons, I find my inspirations through the sponsors. I start to imagine what type of projects I can create with them. Plus, it is always fun to challenge yourself to make projects from the given resources.

In content creation, sometimes you just don't know where to start. Should I create a cooking channel or gaming? How long should my videos be? There are so many questions. But, the best way to start creating, is to just practice, try till you find your niche!

And, this is how All Together is made! Mixing and matching.

What it does

All-Together is a content creation community made with many ingredients. It has 3 main features:

  1. Weekly Hackathon-style content creation contest. Every week, a prompt will be given and creators have to work within the time limit and specified resources to create a video.
  2. Platform to share, ask, chat about anything related to creating content.
  3. Self-help guide.
  • Receive video categories that are currently popular, daily.
  • Get top-viewing videos of each categories to learn what type of videos do well.
  • Get video idea with the prompt machine.

How we built it

  1. Forem was used to create the website and it's functionality.
  2. Google Cloud's Compute Engine API was used to spin up a virtual machine to host the Forem.
  3. HTML, CSS and jQuery was used to create the banners and prompt machine.
  4. Twitter API was used to create the Twitter bot to send out information automatically.
  5. YouTube Data API was used to get the data needed and parse it for the bot.
  6. Raspberry Pi was used to run the bot.
  7. Python3 to code the things from point 4 - 6.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Self-hosting my own Forem. During the process, there were many tools and terms are foreign to me. Things like: Secret Keys and setting up a VM on Google Cloud. Fortunately, the live stream tutorial hosted this weekend and the related documentations were very useful!
  2. Creating and dealing with API keys. Through my project, I had to use quite a number of API keys. I was afraid of sending my keys to my public repo (.gitignore to the rescue!). Also, it was not an easy process of filling up forms and hoping that I don't press or submit the wrong thing. However, by following tutorials like these 2: one, two, gave me more confidence.
  3. System Admin work is very new to me. Setting up the Forem and making sure everything in order is rather difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Hosting my own Forem. I still can't believe it. This is so cool!
  2. Spinning up a VM on Google Cloud.
  3. Creating a Twitter bot.
  4. Incorporating the bot to send tweets of the parsed data from the YouTube Data Api.

What we learned

  1. Getting a hang of Google Cloud and learning how to actually use it. The hosted live stream tutorial was really very useful in this aspect.
  2. Learning what are secrets - the API kind. Using them in my project was difficult at first. But, I can now say, I know how to use them!
  3. Creating a Twitter bot.
  4. Patience is a virtue.

What's next for All Together

  1. Setting up SMTP to work with my app. So that creators will receive email verification whenever they sign up.
  2. Add more style to All Together. Maybe run an actual competition on there?
  3. More interactive resources within All Together. Improve the prompt machine and, tweet out more useful information.
  4. Automate the Raspberry Pi to start my bot script during boot up. More convenience.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates