Find Communities Today was a project that I created to learn React. I've used Gatsby, TailwindCss, Airtable and MongoDB to create this website. It was really fun working on this and I've learned a lot.
The site grew gradually. Initially, it was just a list of communities, then I added the search bar, then the pagination on the home page, then the random generator and finally the like/dislike and comment system.
All the forms on the website are connected to Airtable and after submitting communities to Airtable, the process of moving the data from airtable to a markdown file took forever, so I wrote a quick python script using Jinja2 to get the data from Airtable and automatically create the markdown file on the communities folder.
Unfortunately, this project didn't grow as much as I wanted - mostly due to the fact that I haven't really done any marketing for it. Still, it gets an occasional visit from time to time and that's why I keep it running.
Overview
- The Good
- Users are able to vote and comment on a community
- Created a script that gets data from airtable and turn into a markdown file that adds the community to the list
- Offers a nice appealing way to browse communities and even suggests communities related to the one open.
- The Bad
- Choosing a platform will just throw all the communities in that category - pagination would improve the look
- Viewing all categories page loads a page with two columns - this page doesn't look very appealing
- Adding/updating featured communities needs to be done manually on frontmatter for each community.
- The Ugly
- Community links that are too long break the sidebar a bit - should just create a redirect link
- Liking/Disliking a community from the sidebar doesn't add the vote on the page - but does on the db
Info
Website: https://findcommunities.today/
GitHub repo: Private Repository
Images
Home Page
Community Page
Random Communities Page
Contact Page
