Purpose:

• Especially now with the pandemic, newspapers are constantly being filled with depressing news, negatively affecting our mental health. Our project aims to solve this issue by having a website where only good news are presented! • Our project was developed using Python and SQL on the back-end to scrape various news networks. We used Flask, JavaScript and Vue.js to display features on our website. • On our website, each positive news article is displayed. Users can see a brief description of each article, and can click on the link to read more!

How it was made:

Back-End:

• First, we used Web Scraping to gather information from various news networks, using Python’s newspaper library. • The data of each article was then organized in an SQL database containing a table with the URLs, titles and article content. • Then, a python script queried the SQL database and selected the articles associated with keywords linked with positivity.

Front-end:

• We used Flask framework to create and manage our application by sending news articles to the front end. • We used Vue.js and JavaScript to build the front-end of our website.

Issues we faced:

• 1st issue: We didn’t know how to filter for relevant news articles. We first thought about using AI, but once we looked more into it, we realized that most positive articles used similar keywords. We thus decided to build a bank of keywords and use it to look for articles containing them. • The 2nd issue: We didn’t know how to use SQL queries with Python, in order to filter for good articles. This took to a while to figure out and implement into the project. • 3rd issue: We didn’t know how to move data from Flask to Vue.js. This was a complicated issue, as none of our team members had prior experience with either frameworks. This was solved by implementing an API using CORS.