NewsRUs

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This repo contains our team project for Week 5 of Founders and Coders.

NewsRUs is a website that enables users to quickly search the guardian website and return a filtered list of Guardian news articles.

Try hitting search and see what article pops up!

This project is hosted live on HEROKU.

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The Team

James @jameslevine

Freddie @fweddi

Dylan @dalmano

Kate @dubhcait

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The Project

We used https://open-platform.theguardian.com/ API. It was an easy API to use, one signing up you were given access to a API key.

We started by creating a map of our ideas.

Then we mapped out the flow of data in our app to make sure everyone in the team understood how the front and back-end were linked.

And we also mapped out our file architecture before we typed a line of code!

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Cool Apis we found

• Eventful API http://api.eventful.com/
• TFL https://api.tfl.gov.uk/
• Ticketmaster API https://developer.ticketmaster.com/products-and-docs/apis/getting-started/
• Openweather https://openweathermap.org/api
• OP Geolocation https://ipgeolocation.io/
• Pinterest https://developers.pinterest.com/docs/getting-started/introduction/

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How to set up our project

1. git clone https://github.com/FAC-Sixteen/Week5-purple-sloths.git
2. cd in
3. npm i
4. npm start to run the project on port 4000
5. npm run devStart to run a live server using nodemon on port 4000
6. npm test for tests

You can also run the project live on Heroku here

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What did we struggle with?

• Using the request npm module in the back-end.
• Calling our environment variables in the back-end. We had to use npm package dotenv.
• Using fetch to make an Api from the front end.

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Cool things we learnt?

• Kate - How to use request and fetch.
• Freddie - How data flows from front-end to back-end and back again.
• Dylan - Connecting the front-end to back-end and also the npm path module.
• James - Learning how to test (with supertest and tape).

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Time-Splitting

Day 1 👍

Worked as a four and hot-seated swapping the laptops and committing frequently. We set up a basic front-end, listed the project on Heroku and set up the file structure and basic back-end.

Day 2 👍👍

Built rest of back end and then connected frontend to backend. We also populated the front-end with the returned Guardian data from the API requests.

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Day 3 👍👍👍

Based on issues, we:

• removed console logs and excess code
• added keyboard access to the page
• added a visual explanation for when no results are found
• added placeholder text to explain what the page does
• did a purple sloth

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What did we learn?

• The hot seat did seem to help our productivity
• naming is abstraction, naming your functions is understanding them.
• What/ when to modularise. Breaking things up (too much) can spread you too thin.

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Stretch goals

• word cloud Api to display all the words from each article in a word cloud.
• twitter api displaying the news feed of the requested search

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