Putting the Pickem stuff on hold and revisiting my trucker journal project
Current website and how it looks here:
Trucking Journal
You can make an account on there and add a company/broker.
Was cool making it but........I'm realizing that it looks amateur as hell and UI/UX is kinda trash and I think I was thinking too small in regards to some of my ideas as well..
-- No "forgot username"
-- Site is currently hosted on render/rails and it hangs for the user because the server has to "wake up", there is nothing telling the user that their information is being processed by the server and to just wait a few minutes.
-- The design is kinda meh, especially for mobile
-- Just doing a broker/company(mainly just shipper/receiver info) is cool but basic.
To sort of remedy that:
-- Total revamp of the look. Gonna make this a real site so it can be used. Starting with a sort of product page that explains what it is and why you should use it. In the revamp I will make sure to address issues with UI/UX.
-- Gonna host the site on something like AWS or something that is quick and doesnt need to "wake up"
-- As far as thinking bigger I'm doing 4 things:
----Broker is still there, but I'm expanding the companies to include a bunch more. You can now add entries for things such as Parking, Repair/Service, Hotels, Truck Stops etc.
----Loads, you can now add info for loads you have. You get a load, you can make an entry noting things that are most import to truckers. Things like BOL, trailer number, origin, destination, etc.
---- The third thing is probably the biggest feature. Implementing a google maps for users where they can make their own personal pins for various locations. Users will be shown a blank google maps and they should be able to just click and enter the info for that location. Ideally I would be able to get their location from the info the user already has in the database on the companies they entered and populate the maps with that.
---- The fourth thing that is sort of a longterm goal/plan is making it a mobile application using React Native.
I'm still using the MERN stack. On the frontend I'm switching to Tailwind instead of MUI, which is making the task of creating a more responsive site easier. For state management I'm using Zustand( global client state) and React Query(server/data state). Using toastify to alert the user to info like signing in. Backend is like 80% down imo. I can do CRUD on Loads/Brokers/Companies and have some auth set up. I havent touched anything having to do with google maps api.
Never used Zustand or React Query before this. Messing with Zustand is a hell of a lot easier than messing with RTK/Context.
Havent did anything with React Query on the project yet, but now that I'm messing with the frontend that will change. Looking at youtube vids for it, it seems nice as hell with a number of builtin things like an "isLoading" state and apparently it automatically refetches data that is stale.
As far as design, this is how the product page looks so far. This is just the bg image for the hero section. So 1/3 of it. The mobile part you see is for mobile using Safari, not an actual mobile application. Color scheme I havent decided yet, but liking the dark color of the bg image, so may stick with that. Havent decided on a name yet, which is why you see "OTR Journal" and "Trucker Pad".
github.com
adventofcode.com
openlearninglibrary.mit.edu
pll.harvard.edu
