Inspiration
With the current political climate in America today becoming more and more divisive, the team saw an opportunity to make a change for the good. The team decided that news articles, sources, and authors/writers are the biggest culprits in this extremely polar political conundrum - so that is what we focused on providing to the user.
What it does
This app allows the user to query news articles from a variety of sources and authors. The user is also able to filter the query based on the political bias of the news sources and authors. Additionally, all articles and authors that are shown have a color indicative of their political bias so that the user is well informed on the lean of any article, author, or news site that they wish to select.
How we built it
For the back-end, we leveraged MongoDB Atlas, hosted in GCP, for our database solution. This allowed us to store data relevant to the articles we were gathering, as well as cache our search results as to make sure we didn’t exceed our API quota. To retrieve news information, we leveraged NewsAPI, a free API that makes it simple and easy to retrieve headlines or related articles to a search query. Lastly, in order to process the information on our backend, we created our own API using FastAPI. This allowed us to interact with our database through CRUD operations as well as trigger scripts that interacted with our third-party APIs.
Challenges we ran into
On the front end, there were many minute challenges mostly related to stylistic optimizations that are largely subjective - the majority of challenges on the front end were related to this. However, there were much more severe (though much less) issues when implementing the back-end into the front-end. We did not encounter any significant roadblocks in the backend until the very last hour. Our script to reach out to our third-party APIs broke unexpectedly, and we had very little time to fix it. This meant that our database couldn’t receive new queries and could only query data we cached in the database. Unfortunately, we were unable to get it working again before the project submission.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The app is very close to being complete and would have been if not for the unexpected API-related problems - for that we are extremely proud. On more specific notes : The landing page is very aesthetically pleasing The backend, being as complex as it is, was very impressive to have been completed at all. Our team's use of git was easy and flowed very smoothly. Finally, the workflow went extremely well, too. The front-end and back-end partners split up and worked in separate channels and would periodically check in on the others throughout the night.
What we learned
This project was a great opportunity to learn how to make an API using the FastAPI as well as a chance for the front-end team to gain experience with the best methods of creating user-friendly and interesting web pages.
What's next for The American News Spectrum
Unfortunately, The American News Spectrum will not receive further development from the team in the future.
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