MyJournal

COVID making your months blur? Losing track of time? Forgetting what you did last week? MyJournal can help you!

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Inspiration

As someone who's quite forgetful, and with quarantine blurring the days, I have a tendency of forgetting when things are happening, when I did a task, etc. etc. As someone who's not very artsy, instead of using bullet journals, I've been using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the days and to motivate myself - so far this has been working, as knowing what I do everyday encourages me to be productive and productivity makes me happy (though the interface is poor for journal entries). The productivity category of this hackathon inspired me to create an online journal, so I could note daily occurrences with an interface more suitable than that of an Excel spreadsheet :)

What it does

The website allows you to note your daily routines, check off whether you've completed a task and add a written submission for every day, using a simple calendar format.

How I built it

Django was used to create the front-end and back-end of the website, and its SQLite database was used to store journal/day entries. HTML and CSS was used to create the website, as well as CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap and Materialize for further styling. JavaScript was used to create dynamic components.

Challenges I ran into

  • Struggled with setting up the Django database models, as I have little experience with databases
  • Little to no experience with JavaScript

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud that I was able to complete this website as this is the first time I have created a functional website alone. As this is my first individual hackathon, I am pleased that I was able to overcome the time restrictions and challenges to create a prototype of what I hope to improve beyond this hackathon.

What I learned

I learnt how to set up Django databases/models and work with them, as well as how to set up and build the website from scratch. I learnt how to use JavaScript, as I was inexperienced with the language previously.

What's next for MyJournal

Improving the UI for each day entry, so it has more functionality (for example, a section for noting meals), and creating a user system. After further functionality has been added, I would also like to deploy it.

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