topheryun / magic-jojo-ball

Magic 8 Ball except answers are JoJo memes.

Magic-JoJo-Ball

A simple website that functions as a Magic Eight Ball. You ask a yes or no question and receive and answer. The twist is that the answer is in the form of a JoJo meme, because everything is a JoJo meme. This project is a collaboration between myself and an ex-classmate for submission at the Silly Hacks hackathon.

Inspiration

My first thought for something silly was a sort of meme dispenser. Just something that can give you a random meme when you're craving one. As we discussed possible uses, we came up with the Magic Eight Ball idea and just rolled with it.

The Split

My partner Marc went with the front end (HTML/CSS) and I took care of the backend (JavaScript/S3). When it came to testing and fixing errors, we would help each other out. If there were issues that couldn't be solved easily, we would pause what we're doing and help the other person out with the problem. This method made it so that neither of us would be stuck on a single problem for too long.

The Golden Experience

Both of us are pretty new to the world of web design, so we didn't know if the scope of the project would be too shallow or not. The entire thing was a challenge in the sense that it was all new. Since our idea was simple, our mistakes and challenges were mostly silly errors like not writing the keyword function or mixing up classes and id's. After finishing the basics of our project we attempted some sliding animations. I think the examples we looked up might have been deprecated because we ran into a lot of problems in getting the animations to work at all. In the end, we solved it by mixing a couple of different solutions we found on the web. Putting everything on Amazon's AWS S3 was really simple, and there were only a couple minor issues that were solved fairly quickly.

Overall the experience was great! I think we both learned a ton about web development. The only thing I will do differently next time is be more ambitious with the project. I think if we really exerted ourselves, we could have come out with a better product. However, since it was our first web site, I'm pretty proud of what we're accomplished.

The project is best enjoyed in a maximized or fullscreen window, and was tested mostly on Firefox and Chrome. You can find admire this project in action here: https://magic-jojo-ball.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/magic-jojo-ball.html