Happy News

Happy News

Inspiration

The news is mostly negative, and Covid-19 hasn't made the situation better. We want to provide a source of real news that contains only the positive stories from news of the day.

What it does

It's a webapp that only shows you happy news.

How we built it

Our website uses two news APIs to get the news (Bing, New York Times). Once we get the news, we use Microsoft's Text Analytics to perform sentiment analysis on each of the headlines. If it's not a 'positive' headline (according to the sentiment analysis), we filter it out. Once all the unhappy stuff is filtered out, we upload the positive news stories to an Azure SQL database. We use a serverless Azure Function to automatically perform this news-gathering/filtering/uploading process once every hour, so that we always have fresh news. The user views the news on a Blazor web app, hosted at happynews.azurewebsites.net. When a user loads the page, instead of performing the news-gathering/sentiment-analysis process every time, it just retrieves the pre-filtered news stores from the SQL database, which cuts down on API usage and resource strain drastically.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the web app to access any kind of info is impossible without an API, so we had to make an API to translate between the database and the website.