Trek For Hope

In 2021 my step dad was diagnosed with a rare type of bile duct liver cancer. In face of this, he decided to do a fundraiser to raise awareness. He and my mom travelled out to BC and he began cycling his way back as she followed in an RV. Over the course of 65 days he travelled 4647km, and raised over $18,000 for research and Make A Wish. Thankfully he fought through it and is lucky enough to be in remission for the past 2 years.

When I heard he was going to be making this crazy journey, I knew I needed to help bring awareness to help his goal. I knew people would be driven to this story and in this social media age, they would want to tag along. I also knew that a website would be a good idea so news sources could drive traffic for fundraising.

The site was going to have configurations and content which means it needed a way to change those values easily. I decided to build the backbone from Laravel and Laravel Nova. It's a solid base that's extremely well documented and well made that would allow me to easily build out the functionality I needed.

Laravel would also be a great base for my API. This way I could build out the frontend using the technology I wanted and leverage Laravel as the backend. I decided to go with React for the frontend as I had been working with it a lot at the time. If I remember correctly, I also wanted it to be an installable PWA which lead me to a React implementation as well. Unfortunately at the time Laravel didn't have any native integrations with React which meant I had to build it out myself. Luckily I had an ecosystem I was using for other small projects that I could reuse for this.

I knew they would have their hands full with their journey so I couldn't be adding any complex processes to their flow. They were going to be posting frequently in their Facebook group, so I decided to integrate with Facebook's API to sync that post data into the website where I could display it. Because Facebook's API requires an OAuth flow, it still required a manual step of pressing a button in the admin panel, but it was better than having to recreate the content.

The key to hooking people in was being able to show where they were in the moment. He was going to be using a pre-established path, but just in case I decided to make it configurable. All he would have to do is reimport a KML file that his trail plotting service provides and the site would update.

With the trail available, the next step was grabbing their current location and plotting it along the path. The solution was simple enough. When they were on an admin page, I grabbed their current location from the browser every couple of minutes, fetched some place details to get the province and city, and stored that information in the database. This way all they would need to do is login, leave the page open, and the site would be updated. Plotting their position along the line took a bit of math, but it was easy enough as well.

This was probably my most visited personal project. Over 2400 page views, 1100 visitors with a peak of 140 one of the days where a local news station picked up his story after his bike was stolen. I'm very happy with how it turned out and that I was able to contribute to such an amazing cause. Unfortunately I took the site down this past year to avoid ever increasing domain costs. I do want to create a "playback" feature to re-view their journey and posts they published along the way but for now that remains in my backlog.