AI enhanced news aggregation.

Technical summary

POLYNews provides an integrated approach to reading news from a variety of sources.

Articles are retrieved via public RSS and grouped by story using a TF-IDF BOW model. The most important news of the day is inferred by how extensively a story is covered across multiple sources.

Requirements

• Postgres 12
• Ruby 2.6
• Node 14
• Yarn 1.22
• Heroku CLI

Roadmap

• Track article popularity and integrate that into the headline/most important logic.
• Switch to a n-gram model to improve story grouping
• Customized user recommendations using past viewing history to train the model.
• Expand categories and sources to provide more granular and in depth coverage.
• Switch to a magazine-like UI which emphasizes article importance

Application setup

Prepare the application for local execution with:

> bin/setup

Among other things, this will:

• Setup the heroku remote
• Install Ruby and JS dependencies
• Create, migrate and seed the database
• Download and group the first batch of news articles
• Run the specs and lint the application

Code Verification

POLYNews uses a variety of tools to maintain code correctness, consistency and quality. Before merging new code the expectation is:

• All specs pass (rspec)
• 90% test coverage (simplecov)
• Adherence to the style guide (no rubocop offenses / specifically disable where necessary)
• Minimum 90% quality score on all code files (rubycritic)

To verify the application run:

> bin/verify

Run the application

Run the following:

> bin/rails server

Application is available at localhost:3000.

The root and /news routes provide the public interface for the application.

Admin routes are accessible at /channels. In production, the admin routes are protected with HTTP Basic Authorization. Set the ADMIN_USERNAME and ADMIN_PASSWORD environment variables to specify admin credentials.

The admin routes are useful for troubleshooting, but generally changes should be made via the db seeds.

Configuring and updating the news sources

The news:update rake task is provided for refreshing the current news articles.

The news:full_refresh rake task will completely refresh the news by emptying the db, reseeding and then downloading articles from scratch. This is particularly helpful when large scale changes are made to the channels.

Production

POLYNews is available online at polynews.co

(Initial load may take a moment for the Heroku dyno to spin up)