Student-run websites provide alternatives to find dining and laundry availability

Aaron Hunter and Garrett McNamara created FoodFinder, a website that lists campus dining locations that are currently open. They created the site after realizing the Mason Hour of Operation site was cluttered and hard to navigate (photo by Jenny Krashin).

If time is money, then these three students are out to save a couple bucks.

Tyler Hallada, Garrett McNamara and Aaron Hunter have created alternatives to Mason Dining’s Hours of Operation and eSuds websites in order to quickly convey information to busy students.

Hallada, a junior at Northeastern University and former Mason student, created GMU Laundry, a website that provides washer and dryer availability details for Mason’s laundry rooms.

McNamara and Hunter, both graduate students at Mason, co-created FoodFinder, a website dedicated to showing students open dining venues.

FoodFinder allows students to see what dining venues are open on campus at any given time in an easy-to-navigate list.

It was created as an alternative to the Hours of Operation page that Mason’s Dining Services runs on its website.

“It’s really supposed to be a simple answer to the question ‘where can I eat right now?’” said McNamara, who is currently earning his master’s in applied information technology. “It’s really hard to find out where you can eat because what you get from the Dining Services website is a big list of open and close hours. It’s not really sorted in any way.”

Hunter, who is earning his master’s in computer engineering, and McNamara launched FoodFinder in February.

The website’s display is relatively simple, showing a list of all dining options open at the time of user access.

According to Hunter, the website automatically weeds out venues that are closed, allowing users to determine what is available with just a quick glance to avoid “digging through the dining page.”

Hallada, a computer science major, has a similar goal of simplicity with his website GMU Laundry.

GMU Laundry was launched last semester in April. It shows the number of washers and dryers that are taken and available in a dorm’s laundry room.

This information is the same basic data that eSuds, Mason’s laundry availability website, provides. However, Hallada believes that the design of eSuds is cluttered, so he programmed his website to be a simpler experience. 

“I wanted to build something that you could visually understand in under five seconds. It’s very minimalistic,” Hallada said.

The website is a single page containing a drop-down menu where a user can select his or her laundry room preference.

The number of washers and dryers available in that area is then presented in basic graph format.

Users of the social media website Reddit may already be familiar with these two websites. Both GMU Laundry and FoodFinder were posted on Mason’s subreddit after being launched last semester.

Hallada, McNamara and Hunter have all reported that feedback on their websites has been mainly positive.

“So, right off the bat, the GMU subreddit really liked [FoodFinder] and it was at the top spot for a couple of days,” McNamara said.

Hallada in turn saw a spike in his website’s page views after he posted a link to GMU Laundry in Mason’s subreddit.

With the popularity of their site increasing, McNamara and Hunter hope to expand to potentially include features such as a warning system that tells users when dining venues are about to close and increased accuracy during holidays when dining locations have varied hours.

There is also potential for a FoodFinder mobile app.

Both of these websites were created to ensure that busy students have quick and convenient access to important dining and laundry information.

“At the end of the day I was happy to make something that I myself found useful,” Hunter said.

This story appeared in the Sept. 16 edition of Fourth Estate Weekly.