BU-PP.co.uk

 

bu-pp.co.uk allows students to gain a greater exposure to their portfolio sites and possibly increase the SEO performance.

Students submit their names and portfolio links on the website, the data is then verified by an admin to stop malicious links or words. Then each student who has signed up will add a piece of code to their website which will pick a number of random students names and links to display.

Originally I created the backend using a PHP in Googles AppEngine and MySQL and tested it for a week. I realised it would cost more than it needs to for the amount of data we will be handling/storing so I decided to scrap that backend and start from scratch using Googles Firebase service.

Firebase already has many useful features, the features I found useful were:

• Price – Firebase’s free plan was great for this project. It meant I do not have to fork out any of my own money.
• Authentication – They already had a system in place for authentication of users including being able to use non-standard credentials such as Facebook, Google, GitHub. But I only used normal email as I wanted to restrict access to students using the *@bournemouth.ac.uk email.
• Database – They have a great API to access your connected NoSQL database. This was a lot lighter to use than MySQL as we were not working with a large complex dataset.
• Hosting – I used the hosting capabilities to host the static website and all the files that the students  needed to add to their websites

Here is a short list of all tech used in this project:

• NoSQL
• JavaScript
• JQuery
• HTML
• CSS
• MaterializeCSS – Website Framework