recap

geographical news aggregator focused on local news

the inspiration

Going to college 2000 miles away from home means you get distanced from the local news at home. You don't really hear about or get recommended local news articles because, well, home is not local anymore. The only time you'd probably hear about your hometown is if something Really Big happened and your hometown made national news. One of my teammates, Gary, shared a story of how he didn't even know a big flash flood had happened near his hometown until he went out of his way to search for his local news. Thus, recap was born. The idea is to allow the user to set a location/region (think Plano, Texas, or Austin metropolitan area, or American Southwest) and pick news categories to receive articles from, and then show local articles with pins on the map. Users can then log in and save their location/category preferences and get local news in their notifications or inbox.

the tech

On the front end, we used React and Bootstrap, as well as some Python scripts to reformat our location data. We also used Google Firebase and Google Maps API.

future work

Definitely making the interface more robust. Being able to click and select regions directly on the map, as well as giving the map markers an accurate location would be awesome. Also, recap crashes when you log in? Doesn't sound good.