Blaze

Important

Blaze was created by the creators of Graze, winner of RidgeHacks 2024.

Devpost: https://devpost.com/software/blaze-wczt9d

A visually appealing wiki page to reduce confusion within the community

Blaze is a web-based application that allows users to create wikis about their community or anything at all! This project contains HTML, CSS, and Flask files, along with a “static” folder that holds various images and code. In this README, we will guide both newcomers and experienced developers through the key aspects of this project.

This project is made for MontyHacks VII by Alex Sheng, Dhruv Rakhade, Jay Fang, and Anshuman Roy.

Table of Contents

• Blaze
  • Table of Contents
  • Introduction
  • Our Purpose
  • Key Features
  • Getting Started
  • Usage
  • Simplicity
  • Extensibility
  • Customization

Introduction

Blaze is a simple yet powerful tool that enables users to create their own informatic pages about the community and share information with the public. Whether you are interested in helping the community, a student, or a developer looking to learn and experiment with Flask, this project offers something for everyone.

Our Purpose

Blaze is designed to make people of all races, ethnicities, genders, and more feel comfortable in a safe, caring online community. From advocating for diversity and creativity, to allowing users to create multicultural pages with factual information, kindness and welcoming are indispensable in Blaze. We want to aid different communities, and help them vocalize their information, accomplishments, and more.

Key Features

• Creating wikis in Markdown
• A user-friendly web interface
• Real-time wiki updates
• A modern and sleek signup and login page
• Beautifully curated user interface

Getting Started

To start using Blaze, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository to your local machine:

   git clone https://github.com/your-username/blaze.git
   

2. Open the project directory:

   cd blaze
   

3. Run the command

flask --app app run

4. Open the URL given by Flask to access the website

5. Follow the instructions on the website.

Usage

For Newbies If you're new to web development or just want to use the application, here's a simple guide:

Open the file uploader by following the “Getting Started” steps.

1. You'll see an input field labeled “Create Wiki.” Enter your files here. For example, you can create montgomery.md and make a wiki page about Montgomery!
2. Press the "Create" button, and the file will appear on the internet.

Experiment with different markdown files and see how the wiki database changes in real-time.

Simplicity

Blaze focuses on a simplistic web design, for maximum user experience, and modern, sleek user interface. With reduced distractions, this carries the purpose, motivation, and essence of Blaze. According to websitemagazine.com, “Simple design makes it easy to draw the viewer's eye to the most important area of the page - and, if you're looking for conversions, that's your call to action. Navigating a cluttered interface is no fun. It can be confusing, overwhelming and frustrating"(Lundin).

Extensibility

We plan to further expand the website's capabilities and functions. Additionally, we also would like to enhance 'Blaze', and make it more world-renowned through heavy improvements so that communities of different, races, genders, ethnicities, and more, all have a comfortable space to learn and discuss a broad range of topics. Blaze has immense improvement potential, having the opportunity to be recognized on an international scale, for advocating different communities, including affirmative action organizations. Improvements that could be made in the future are open respectful discussion forums and threads, open organizational tags to sort categories, and automate functional and efficient moderation, only to name a few. We would like to one day develop Blaze to a more extensive, refurbished point, and raise awareness to give back to our communities in need. The potential is vast, and the uses for Blaze are limitless, with our aspirations to create a positive, helpful digital community growing in the future.

Customization

Experienced developers may want to customize the project further. You can modify the code to change the appearance of the homepage, add additional features, or integrate it into other web applications.

• The Flask code for this project can be found in the app.py file. We also use jQuery for sleek JavaScript operations.

• The code listens for form submissions using jQuery. When the form is submitted, it retrieves the file from the user's computer, and uploads it into our safe and secure database.

Happy Blazing! 💻🔥