Okay, so today I’m gonna spill the beans on my little experiment with “news benfica”. It was a bit of a rollercoaster, lemme tell ya.
It all started when I was trying to get my hands on some specific news articles about Benfica, the football club. I was tired of sifting through tons of irrelevant stuff just to find what I needed. So, I thought, “Why not build something myself?”
First thing I did was to research available news APIs. Man, there are a lot of them! Some were free, some were paid, and some were just plain clunky. I ended up settling on a couple of free ones to start with, figuring I could always upgrade later if needed.
Then came the fun part: coding. I decided to use Python because I’m relatively comfortable with it. I started by writing a simple script to hit the APIs, pull down the data, and dump it into a JSON file. That part was pretty straightforward.
Next, I had to parse the JSON data. This is where things got a bit messy. Each API returned the data in a different format, so I had to write separate functions to handle each one. It was tedious, but hey, gotta do what you gotta do.
After parsing, I needed to filter the articles. I only wanted the ones that were actually about Benfica. So, I added some code to search for keywords like “Benfica”, “Águias” (Eagles, their nickname), and the names of their key players.
Now that I had the filtered articles, I wanted to store them somewhere. I opted for a simple SQLite database. It’s lightweight and easy to set up. I created a table with columns for the title, URL, publication date, and a snippet of the article content.
The next step was to build a basic UI. I didn’t want anything fancy, just something to display the articles in a readable format. I used Flask to create a simple web app. It just pulls the data from the database and renders it in a HTML template.
And that was it! A basic news aggregator for Benfica news.
But the journey didn’t stop there. I started experimenting with different ways to improve it. I tried:
- Adding more news sources
- Improving the filtering algorithm to be more accurate
- Implementing a caching mechanism to reduce API calls
- Adding a search function
I learned a ton doing this little project. Here’s a few key takeaways:
- API data is messy. Be prepared to spend time cleaning and parsing it.
- Filtering is crucial. The better your filtering algorithm, the more relevant your results will be.
- Don’t be afraid to experiment. Try different approaches and see what works best.
Would I do it again? Absolutely! It was a fun and challenging project that helped me learn a lot about web scraping, data processing, and web development. Plus, now I have a personalized news source for my favorite football team!
Of course, there are still plenty of things I could improve. Maybe one day I’ll get around to adding some fancy features like sentiment analysis or automatic summarization. But for now, I’m happy with what I’ve got.
