Poparallel

Inspiration

In a world with constantly updating, ostensibly reliable news sites, we were tired of manually cross examining our news providers for bias against other sources. If you were to get a breaking news alert from CNN or Fox News, you might want to compare it with other sites’ reportings about the same event, just to ensure that your news isn’t coming to you with a political spin. Previously, doing this would be overly-time consuming; it would require visiting each individual news site and clicking the links to the corresponding article by hand. Our program changes that.

What it does

Whenever a news topic is searched in our program, the PHP searches our selected news sites from across the political spectrum, downloads the RSS feed link, converts the data into XML format. From here, the program converts the data into JSON format and reads the information by parsing a created array with the article in it. The program searches for the keywords and presents the articles from the different news sites in a presentable project.

Challenges we ran into

We started our project with JavaScript but ran into unnecessarily difficult implementation, so we decided to reroute and use PHP for our project. We also ran into issues with PHP variables and we had trouble determining if a condition is true or false.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the aspects of our team we are most proud of is our efficiency. We all managed to work on the project and get a lot done while also getting a decent amount of sleep.

What we learned

We broadened our knowledge of PHP. For example, we learned how to use cURL libraries and loop through a raise.

What's next for Poparallel

On the horizon, we plan to implement more websites for the program to gather data from. This way, we can provide the user with the most perspectives on the same topic as possible and give them all the tools they need to fight the political bias that is embedded in most media sites.