February 12-13

Thursday: 12:55-2:30
Friday: 12:55-2:30

     For the rest of the week, I worked on the app and some planning for the student tech team. We started to look through the applications we had received for the student tech team. Few though they were, most of the applicants seemed like a great fit for the kind of program we are looking like instituting. We had people who were interested in each area we looked at working with. Also, even though we don't have many people right now, it will probably be better for us to start small in our first year with the team so that we can stay organized and have the start-up run smoothly. So, we scheduled a meeting for next Wednesday with all of the applicants we decided to accept right away.
     On the app front, we finally got our database to work with Python! It turns out that Parse has an API for Python, we just couldn't find it. So, now that we can get Parse to work in the scraping code of the app, we will be able to only scrape every once in a while and allow all of the devices who are accessing the information to do so quickly instead of having to scrape every time a page is viewed. We also worked on viewing PDF's of our school newspaper in an app. So far, we have scraped the links that point to the PDF's of the various issues of the paper. Now, we are working on uploading those links to our database, then collecting them from the database in the HTML of the app, and displaying them on the phone. We are also running into an issue with the site we are scraping from, however. The high school's website does not have links to a PDF of every issue of the newspaper. Instead, there are a few consecutive years in which there are no links at all. Additionally, the ones that do have links store them in separate ways. So, we have to figure out how to scrape consistently when the links are in different places and some times aren't there at all. For those that do not appear at all, we have contacted the staff member who supervises the making of the school newspaper to see if he has copies of the missing issues. He has responded that he does have the issues we need, so we will have to scan those issues into PDF format and then give them to the staff member who runs the school website to have them put up.
     This week was very productive for me. I worked on various different projects and I think that they are all coming along nicely. We are making leaps and bounds with the app, which is well on it's way to being functional, and we are starting to turn theory into action with the tech team. Hopefully, we will be able to make enough of a dent in both projects that the future groups will have an easy ride finishing what we've started.