This project was a fun one and helped me grow significantly as a computer scientist and as a coder. all the tools needed where given to me to succeed and the freedom to make something that interested me and was fun, fuel my passion and made me happy to do this final project. Angular is a powerful tool and through the presentations of my fellow classmates I saw many ways that I can work on and improve my own project. One thing that another classmate used was Ionic which a framework built on top of angular that allows for easy app porting to android, ios and other devices and does the creation and scaling for you. Applying this to my project would help me to make it even more stylish and user friendly since at the moment it is not fully mobile friendly and has some of the styling relying on pixel size which will not scale correctly on mobile. I also saw alot of my classmates use a nav bar which would lock in place as you scroll down the screen and have drop down menus and searches, Which I thought my site and app would benefit from.
This project helped me to learn the extent that the skills learned in about software construction can go and that looking to other people’s creations and seeing how they did something can also benefit your site/application as well. I also felt great when I learned a new thing in both Angular or HTML/CSS and seeing it work on my Website made me want to do more and sad that I didn’t have more time to work on this Project. The design patterns and tools learned in this Software Construction and Design class will aid me in any future career i have in software development and i have a newfound respect and interest in front end coding as well since it was one of the best parts of this project in my opinion. Online tutorials and websites that gave examples on how to do certain things helped my project immensely and made the process easier and less stressful. I might return to this project in the near future and further develop the site to become more interactive and user friendly as well as support more devices. One thing I really wanted to do but didn’t have the time to was both a keyword search to find articles that contained a word or words when searched and an auto fill function for searches of sources.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tyler Quist’s CS Blog by Tyler Quist and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

As I finished up the back end part of my project, I Knew I would need to figure out some HTML and CSS because I wanted my site to look good and I haven’t done HTML or CSS since a class I took in High school. Since most of my college coding has been back end stuff I needed a refresher and to look for things similar to what I wanted on my website and to figure out how to adapt them to work for me. Things that i wanted where to display different information at different places, create a better layout for the website, a search bar and, of course, stylish buttons. There was alot of helpful code examples for what I wanted to do for my website which made the process easier. One thing I knew i would need to do was create a border for the news posts since the pictures and text would scale and stretch to fit the whole screen. Once I created a margin for the posts the images and text looked alot better. I decided to bold and make the title font bigger than the description since I wanted to draw the user’s eyes when they read the posts.
I used material classes from angular to make the process of styling even easier and through css i created a better looking website by customize each individual class. I had a search bar and a button to search by source which looked a little to basic so i customized the buttons to be blue, have white text, and when you hoover on it, it places a shadow behind the button. I also made a reset button to return to the “home Page” after a search by source and made the button uniform with the search button.
Lastly I created a list of sources that were all interactive buttons that had the same style as all the other buttons on the website. I wanted to make this list a drop down menu or something that would only appear on the side if you clicked on another button instead of being constantly there, but I did not have enough time to implement this addition to the website. Overall this learning of CSS and HTML was really fun and helped me to realize that this is how I am going to be learning other coding languages in the future and applying them as needed.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tyler Quist’s CS Blog by Tyler Quist and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I was searching for a good api that did not require a key to use since i had no idea how to use one or how long it would take to get one. I searched and searched but I was unsuccessful in my search and ended up looking for one that had a key and an easy process to get that key. when i found the newsApi and it said all you needed to do was give an email address and sign up to get a key, I was ecstatic at the simplicity. After I got the key, I needed to figure out how it worked and what I should do to make using it even easier. I decided like most people on the internet chose to do and save it as a string called api key and passed it at the end of each api request.
I assumed that api keys were used to log what people do with the api and at what times for both security and to keep track of the usage of the api and I was right. Api keys are important for any api to use to keep spam and other malicious users from constantly requesting from your api or server and causing a denial of service. since the people who made the api have access to the keys, they can shut a key off if it request too many times in a certain time frame. I noticed, in my search for an api, that many of the apis had strict rules about how many times you can request in a time frame. The api i was using had pricing plans for different number of requests and how far back you could request articles and how fast they would load. The one i was using was free and allowed me to request 500 times a day which was more than enough for me to show off what it does and test it. The other plans costed 449 dollars a month and 849 dollars a month. these kinds of api that are hosted and easily accessible have the ability to make a lot of money. The other thing I noticed was that they didn’t allow it to be used for commercial use which means if you pay for the larger plans you would be just pumping money into the service without getting anything back.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tyler Quist’s CS Blog by Tyler Quist and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.