During my time at HackMIT, my team and I designed Newswordy, a web application that allows users to view trending headlines from roughly 150 news sources across the web.
In all, users can view trending headlines within their country, predetermined categories, or categories of their creation.
The project was created using Django, Bootstrap, JavaScript, and SQLite.
For organization's sake, it is best to break down the project's main features and explain the technology behind each of them.
Newswordy's home page displays trending headlines within a user's country using IP geolocation. Luckily, Django comes with a pre-installed way to retrieve the user's IP address.
Once retrieved, the application calls ipinfo.io's API to retrieve information on the user's location. After parsing the JSON response, the application extracts the user's country. Afterward, the application calls the News API with the user's country as a URL parameter and extracts an array of trending articles from the JSON response.
The categories feature allows authenticated users to narrow their search to predetermined themes, such as "science", "business", or "technology." This feature also uses IP geolocation to pull trending headlines within a user's country.
The search feature allows users to search for articles on topics of their choice. Unlike the trending headlines or categories sections, the search section searches globally without using IP geolocation. However, if the user's query matches a category within the accepted categories, then the user will be redirected to the category of their choice.
On the trending headlines, categories, and search sections, authenticated users can save article to their "Saved Articles" section. This was achieve by using JavaScript and custom API routes to add a post to a SQLite database and using a many-to-many relationship between users and articles.
Users can also unsave articles on all of the sections, and the webpage will remember if the user has saved the article or not upon a webpage reload.
The login and registration features were achieved with Django's built-in authentication and hashing features.
The account section of the web application allows users to view basic information tied to their account, such as their email, username, date joined, and other fields within the Django default User class.
Newswordy makes use of the following third-party libraries:
- django
- newsapi-python
- python-dateutil
- requests
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
Microsoft
Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent