The Student's Chronicle

Tired of generic news? Craving depth, context, and the why behind the headlines? This is your curated hub for news that educates, not just informs.

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Web Development

Inspiration

In this time-poor society, attention span is limited, and most of the time people are engaged in superficial information absorption. Browsing titles, eyeing key facts is commonplace, while curated news, deeper understanding of historical and cultural backgrounds of events, or thoughtful reflections become rare.

What it does

The website briges this reflection gap through user customized or activated tags to bring more relevant news, automated broader background and social sentiment search to save time and quickly grasp the significance of a news, news clips for revision and self curation. Together they all point to one direction -- a meaninful, personalised information space where news are cognitively processed through multiple angles, promoting thought engaging questions, and filtering into personal notes that tie to favorited news clips.

How we built it

The project actively uses MeDo plugins (The News, AI Search, Web Search, and LLM) to provide students with curated news content enhanced by comprehensive analysis, all presented in a beautiful, organized interface with cream backgrounds, dot-grid patterns, and washi tape styled containers.

UX implements "Progressive Reveal." Headlines appear as a bulleted list. Clicking a headline "unfolds" the content, and starts the generation of news background, social reflections etc.

I aim for a design that appeals to high school students and undergraduates, as they are the target audience that this website would provide the most value to.

Challenges we ran into

The initial prompt was successful in generating a usable website that meets the required objectives. However, upon testing, more featured were discovered to be lacking and thereby needs modification.

Subsequent prompts encountered more issues, as unintended parts are sometimes modified. Even with the use of "Edit" button to point to the specific section to edit due to the duplicated headers, the wrong header section was removed, and the change had to be rolled back.

There were also a few bugs, such as the fact that social integrations (Share on Facebook) buttons were created but did not actually connect to the platform. Instead, it copied the content. Also when country tags were later introduced, activating certain country did not refresh the news items to show news from those countries.

These issues were largely fixed after one or two more prompts.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The whole project was completed in less than 12 hours. I am able to go from ideation, design, development to publishing relatively smoothly without worrying too much about whether something would go wrong. The platform is an enabling tool where non technical people like me can easily get a hang of.

What we learned

It is important to get the initial prompt correct, with the details specified, since subsequent modifications are more error prone.

Credits were not consumed as fast as I expected. I was conservative in the use of initial 300 bonus credit, as I had experience using other platforms.

The platform itself is a massive leap from previous generations of website / app creation platforms in that it can one-shot the main goal in about the right shape.

What's next for The Student's Chronicle

The website deserves wide spread usage to quickly evolve through user feedback and iterations. The idea is sound, the product is a well scoped MVP. The product can better enable knowledge curation through integration with Notion and LLM wiki. It should also be promoted as the best news website for high school and university students alike.

Develop a managed public comment section so that people can learn from the various viewpoints of other people who made the comments.

At the same time, putting in place more guardrails around sensitive or inappropriate news items to better ensure the target audience is consuming age-appropriate materials.

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