Portfolio Project
Account Stats is a website created with the goal of making it easy to collect data from accounts on multiple sites all in one place. I created this by myself over the past three weeks. The first week was mostly spent of front end. Most of the remaining time was spent integrating the needed APIs and cleaning up some previous issues. This can be used by anybody who wants to easily see data from several different accounts. This was inspired by the fact that there are many sites which allow you to get data and statistics from just one account, but Account Stats allows you to get data from several sites for a more complete overview of a person’s information. The front end was done with HTML5 and CSS, the site was hosted on a single web server using NGINX, and all of the API calls and scripting were done in JavaScript. It is fully integrated with the GitHub and Reddit APIs, and partially integrated with the YouTube API, although I would like to fully integrate more sites in the future. There were several challenges encountered during the development of this project. The most prominent of these was the challenge of learning the various APIs. The most difficult of these was the API from YouTube. This is because it has no clear endpoints, a complex authentication process, and insufficient documentation. Unlike most APIs which will have a single endpoint containing a large amount of data on a user, the YouTube API required you to specify some of the data points you wanted to see. It ended up being treated more as a query than a single page containing the necessary data. This can be worked around by a more convoluted series of API calls, but overall, there was much to be learned from all of the APIs used for this project, especially YouTube. In addition to learning new concepts, this project also really helped to solidify knowledge of front end development with HTML and CSS. It was a great experience to build a page from scratch with no framework, but I think in the future it would be more advantageous to utilize some of the power in frameworks like React for example. I find data collection via APIs very interesting and it is certainly something I will continue exploring in the future. If you would like to inspect the code for yourself it can all be found here: https://github.com/nehpets0701/AccountStats. If you would like to try the website it is hosted at http://35.227.109.238/. That contains the deployed project and landing page.
