Student develops news aggregator website while on placement year

Jason & Natalie

Natalie McLaren, a BSc Web Computing with a Year in Industry student, has launched a personalised newsfeed application that she developed with a colleague while on her placement year at digital marketing agency Cyber-duck.

While working at Cyber-duck Natalie learnt two new technologies, and with her colleague decided to develop a project in their spare time, using the two languages.

They developed a news aggregator website called Newscape by fusing PHP framework Laravel with React.js, which allows customers to personalise their newsfeed while also viewing their twitter feed. The site offers news articles in English and German and imports news from 70 news sites. They hope to expand and add more features as the platform grows and they receive feedback from users.

Natalie said ‘Initially Newscape was just a learning experience as we combined two tools which are not usually used together. Now we are really interested in hearing what users think of the website and what features they would like to see on there in future.’

Newscape is available at https://newscape.herokuapp.com/