Sahas

During this devlog, I made the most amount of changes:

1. Ichanged the hero page so that it works reliably on phone - same with the footer
2. I added an about page with basic information about website
3. I added two more fonts; Sora and Caprasimo for emphasizing diffferent part sof UI
4. I added the community poll and improved general functionality
5. I added acknowledgement and other small miscellanous changes

Also, after all of this, I used AI (NOT tracked on hackatime) and it suggested many edits in my code which I approved, but it did brake the site multiple times sadly so i used up all of my credits in literally every IDE and still couldn’t get it to work sadly

In this commit, I got rid of Tally entirely and have a custom form solution. Now, I am usingthe answers.json file for the questions too, and when I update those questions, the site will update! WHen finished, it will sync it to NeonDB integrated into Vercel where I can see! Now, why did I do this?
3 reasons:

1. In the quiz, I didn’t want it to be a list of 10 questions since it can overwhelm the user and make them not solve the quiz. Also, if you don’t answer a question and click the submit button, it simple won’t work and won’t tell you why unless you scrool up to that question (where there is some tiny texy saying question required). With this layout, it only shows one question at a time and also makes sure that each question is answered since it is the only way to continue.

2. I didn’t want the Tally logo in the back. Yes, it was small, but my site will still look more professional without the Tally logo and the signature Tally look.

3. I wanted to add custom CSS to my site. With tally, the only way to do this is to pay $29 (every month!) which I obviously didn’t. Now it doesnt scream Tally when I look at the design.

Yes, tally is good, but it will never match the amount of flexibility you have when you do the forms yourself (though… if i had the tally pro plan for free, I’d scrap this for tally since it is so much easier). With this, I also get email notifications for each now form submission since it also fetches Formsubmit.co in the background (free email with no API key) and is very easy to integrate into the site since it doesnt need a backend and SMTP and all of that.

Now, with every question, it gives you immediate feedback which is exactly what I want. In the future, I am planning to make it such that it will parse all the results from the previous users in the DB and find out who got how many correct.

In this, I designed the Figma design for my WasteWise Site! This is to ensure consistency with the site and also to make sure that I don’t have a ‘writers block’ when I am coding the design, or code something that looks weird and have to change it 100 times.

I wrote my documentation.md and moved everything to GitHub pages (idk how i spent 2 and a half hours on a documentation 😭) but yeah, I might have also made some other small changes which I just don’t remember. I moved the project to GitHub pages to get the build: passing, and I hope that I won’t need to call an API like Cloudflare Pages functions since Github pages is simply a static site.

In this commit, I worked on the contact form and made sure it worked and also fixed some miscellaneous bugs. On top of this, I added impact statistics on the home page since before all it had was a hero and a footer :( yeah. So these imoact statistics are from EPA Warm Averages and the World Counter js implemented on the site. And last i added a favicon

In this commit, I integrated the tally form. With the form, I wanted three things:

1. Unlimited responses - I didn’t want the website to just randomly close and the quiz to not work just because the max submissions was reached
2. Nice UI/UX - I don’t want it to look like a basic google forms since that is honestly quite boring nobody likes that
3. No big logo banner - I don’t want the jotform thing where there is this big banner on the bottom
4. Backend - I don’t want to be like formsubmit.io where it just sends an email - I want it to actually show a table of responses
5. Answers - I want the users to see the answers after finished.

At first there was literally no good options and I was literally thinking selfhosting this - but there is not much point. So, at the end, I found a workaround with Tally where it can send the answers in the query parameters to the answers page (yes it is a real workaround but the users don’t notice anything)

I wrote 2 JS files during this 1 1/2 hours.

1. I wrote the photon-autocomplete.js where it will automatically find relevant places as you search, e.g. in Google Maps when you type ‘Hack Cl’, it suggests ‘Hack Club Falls Road, Shelburne, VT, USA’ as the result. This is free using photon.komoot.io, so that I don’t have to get a Google API key.
2. I also added the javascript for the map to actually work and show the location - well, I didn’t change anything, I just copypasted it into a separate JS file so there’s probably a lot of copypaste in hackatime (pls dont ban me im refactoring)
   I also make few misc changes
   idk how much to write

I worked on the basic app in Astro and the CSS (this took so long honestly) and now i have a liquid galss style app which looks nice and good, The header is pill shaped and inspired by craft.do’s landing page with the big image in the center and the liquid glass topbar. I liked to small it compact rather than the full width of my screen, so that even if I forget to put padding on headings you could still see them, and also it just looks better in my opinion.

For privacy reasons I am using Fontsource, OpenStreetMap Nomatim and Photon(coming soon) for maps instead of Google Maps and Fonts

I was also going to write the photon autocomplete js but then remembered that maybe I should devlog before doing that. honestly i am really fatigued by the css but i rlly want to finish the photon autocomplete since photon.komoot.io seems like a really nice free tool to use for maps instead of Google Maps which is less private and also paid. like… do i really want to pay for a google maps api key when there is a free private faster (since its not loading trackers) and subjectively better version…?

i hope this is enough detail to justify the 3h+ of work that I did (sorry flavortown review if it isnt pls js tell me and i can write more idk this is my first project)