Assignment 3 - Persistence: Two-tier Web Application with Flat File Database, Express server, and CSS template

Blogatron Beta

https://blogatronbeta.glitch.me

A simple/user interface-freindly blog that users can read/post stories, more short ones compared to larger pieces of news/headlines. Displayed in a deck-of-cards manner. User can click on an image to read the full story and comments. Simply log in using billy as username and 12345 as password for an exisiting account or sign up as a new user (can put literally anything) to be able to post, comment, edit, and delete. For now, only urls are accepted for images. This can be easily done by copying the address of the image on Google Images or anywhere else, for that matter. If you leave the url blank, that's fine too.

• Database utilized: MongoDB/Mongoose because I have been familiar with it in the past and comfortable.
• Authentication strategy: Passport Local with Mongoose since it seems to be the easiest and quickest option.
• A lot of style elements from tooplate.com were incorporated.
  • slight changes due to personal preferences were made such as color and positioning.
• body-parser, express, passport, passport-local, method-override, and express-session are the five express middleware packages that were used.

Technical Achievements

• EJS: I used ejs instead of DOM manipulation to provide cleaner and more concise code. Using ejs is a lot more efficient and reliable compared to hard-coding the html.
• Configuration of MongoDB: I used MongoDB/Mongoose as explained above instead of lowDB, and since it's not easily supported in Glitch, I set it up using Mongo Atlas for Cloud database service, and configured it inside my app.js file.
• Seeding the Database: I seeded the database with some data inside the server before I handled post requests from client to test things out and see how it's supposed to work later.
• RESTful Routing: Applied REST pattern to routes

Design/Evaluation Achievements

• Experimenting with SCSS, SASS: I tried playing around with a lot of different HTML5 and CSS3 animations to use but due to ejs, most of them were unsuable.