RedPen

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Inspiration

As a journalism major, I'm constantly trying to figure out ways in which we can improve upon how we report the news. I realized that one of the most crucial problems is that there's really no way for a journalist to ask their audience what they thought of an article, except for janky comment sections. RedPen seeks to provide an avenue for communication, and the gathering of both quantitative (which is incredibly hard to come by!) and qualitative data.

What it does

RedPen is an app in two parts — the RedPen website, and the RedPen Review Chrome extension. The website serves as a hub for users, publications, and all of the survey responses that have been pushed through. The Chrome extension (which could not be approved within the time frame, though I show it off in the demo) allows for users to easily give feedback on whatever news article they're reading, no matter the publication.

How I built it

The web server is deployed through Heroku, and runs off of Node.js, serving hard-coded HTML/CSS/JS files. It also connects with a SQL database (also hosted via Heroku) to store account information and survey responses. Lastly, the Chrome extension is also put together in HTML/CSS/JS (and a little Node).

Challenges I ran into

The SQL database just quit working for like 10 hours. I had to completely reconfigure the backend and find a new hosting provider; luckily Heroku had several options. Also, I had never before put together a Chrome extension, so making a functioning application with the tricky constraints an extension definitely took quite a while.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm honestly proud I got it working — I was unsure if it was within the scope of a weekend, but I managed to get the barebones functioning. There's definitely a lot more to do, as it only has the most basic functionalities at the moment, but I'm excited to tackle them.

What I learned

I learned all about Chrome extension, GitHub (I had refused until this project to learn what a commit was), and some Node networking techniques that were new to me. I also greatly expanded my knowledge of SQL — within my one database, I had a lot of data to keep track of. And with the extra hour or so I had left, I tried my hand at some CSS!

What's next for RedPen

There's a lot I want to do moving forward — firstly, just improve the basic functionality and work out all of the kinks. But past that, I see RedPen as being a source of fact-checking and discourse within the realm of current events and news — a discussion board or social-media style shindig would be perfect. I also want to add built-in data analytics for publications, so they can start making sense of the quantitative data! I genuinely think it's a useful tool (that we currently lack!) to solve so many problems facing the industry of journalism — or at least take a step in the right direction.

(Also, to get the extension approved and on the Chrome store — but in the meanwhile, check out the website!)