Dhall Digest

Dhall Digest is a website that I built to provide an alternative frontend to my college’s official dining hall menu site. It can be found at dhall-digest.com.

I felt that Berry College’s official dining hall menu did a poor job of presenting the information in a concise and easy-to-read manner.

First thing the user sees on the official menu.

Before the menu can be read, first time users must accept cookies, and all returning users must close a pop-up asking for personal contact information. After a couple of clicks, you get to this page:

Layout of dining hall menu.

The entire menu is layed out as a grid of cards so that only six are visible to the user at a time (Best-case scenario on desktop, mobile is even worse). Not to mention that half of the menu items are condiments, so it is incredibly difficult to determine what is currently available.

For contrast, this is the first thing a user sees on Dhall Digest:

Homepage of Dhall Digest.

My goal for Dhall Digest was to have the most important information instantly available. The locations, originally split into tabs, are now all in the same page together with their menu items in list format instead of cards. Additionally, Dhall Digest only displays the menus for the current day. Instead of a date and time picker like in the original, there are nav buttons to select the meal. On load, the page automatically selects the meal that corresponds to the current time of day.

I did this by misapropriating the REST API from the official menu. A script runs every evening to pull in the data for the next day. The frontend is a single PHP file that pulls the current day’s data from a SQL database and renders it.