Unfortunately the process that I was using to view the data has since been patched, so I no longer have access to the data. It was fun while it lasted! I ended up changing the site to show parking citations in Boulder Colorado but that stopped working too. Feel free to take a look at the screenshots to see what it was like when it was working. I wish I had more pictures of how it looked on desktop but I was leading people to the site through QR codes so the majority of visitors were on their phones.
This is a personal project that displays various forms of parking citation data at my school, James Madison University.
Overall I'm pretty impressed with this project and how quickly I got it up and running. Here are some of my thoughts:
- I built this website in a mobile-first style, because in theory it should reduce the amount of time I'd need to spend to get the site looking nice on both mobile and desktop.
- For the first time ever, I decided to use Typescript to clean up the quirks and messyness of javascript. It didn't take that long to get used to using it, but I feel that I'm not really using it efficiently.
- Firebase makes having a cloud database so easy. Google is spooky but their services are hard to beat. When I started the project I went with a "make a working version and worry about efficiency later" outlook when it came to structuring the database. The cost of this has been fairly low so far (~$1/month), I can definitely get that lower, and possibly to $0/month.
- React - build the UI/UX.
- Typescript - make javascript better.
- Google Firebase - run cloud functions and cron jobs.
- Netlify - building the site from this github repo (for free).
- Recharts - cool graphs
