College Social Network
Discover Hidden Talents on Campus
Overview
Built as a final year B.Tech project at GITA Bhubaneswar, this college-exclusive social media platform enables students to discover and showcase hidden talents. Students can upload and share their creative work — photography, music, videos, artwork, and written content — creating a vibrant campus community. The platform features institutional authentication ensuring only verified college students can participate, an engagement-based ranking system (likes, views, shares) to highlight top creators, category-based content feeds (Music, Photography, Art, Videos), and a content upload system with media processing.
Key Contributions
- ◆Built a secure, college-only social platform with institutional email authentication
- ◆Implemented engagement-based ranking system (likes, views, shares) to surface top student creators
- ◆Designed category-based content feeds — Music, Photography, Art, Videos, Written Content
- ◆Built media upload system supporting images, audio, and video with server-side processing
- ◆Created responsive UI with grid-based gallery layouts for browsing student portfolios
Engineering Deep Dive
The platform uses a PHP backend with MySQL database. The ranking algorithm combines view count, like count, and recency using a weighted scoring formula — newer content gets a time-decay boost while viral content stays visible longer. Institutional authentication verifies college email domains at signup, and an admin dashboard allows moderators to review flagged content. The gallery uses a masonry grid layout that adapts to different media aspect ratios.
Challenges
- ◆Handling media uploads (images, audio, video) with different format requirements and size limits
- ◆Building a fair ranking algorithm that balances recency with engagement metrics
- ◆Ensuring platform security with institutional authentication to prevent unauthorized access
Learnings
- ◆Full-stack web development with PHP and MySQL from scratch
- ◆Media handling and processing on the server side
- ◆Database design for social features (likes, comments, follows, rankings)
- ◆User authentication and authorization patterns