Tidbits

Introducing Tidbits! Small bits of news
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Inspiration

People watch news obessively these days. There is always something new, always some major event happening. News companies know this and capitalize from the more people read. Articles are purposely obfuscated, dramatacized, and have click bait titles to generate more views and more revenue.

People spend too much time endlessly scrolling. Endless scroll features keep us on apps and waste time, when often, the first few articles are the only ones we need to read.

What it does

Introducing Tidbits!

We gather the latest new updates from a variety of sources, to prevent bias. We then parse the articles content and summarize them into brief, easy to read updates.

There are size diffrent news categories to explore!

How we built it

Tidbits leverages a real-time news API from newsapi.org. This ensures we have the latest updates as well as pull information from a variety of sources, to prevent biased info.
Article content is parsed through a natural language processing API, which shortens the text up to 95%!
Headlines and photos are served to the frontend through React.
The backend is designed through Flask.
The application is hosted through Heroku.

Challenges we ran into

It was a little tough to host both the backend and frontend through heroku (without Dockerizing). This was the first time I used a React frontend with Flask, so it was a learning experience getting it working and hosted.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It works!

What we learned

How to integrate React with a Flask backend. I chose Flask because I wanted to handle data easily through Python on the backend, but getting it hosted with Heroku took a little more work.

What's next for Tidbits

Look into a better API to leverage - the application's performance is gated by the latency of the APIs we implemented. It would be best to use a database or cache to store results, instead of using an external API.