grind is an experiment to allow viewing a spectrum of news and blogs, grouped by sentiment analysis. The goal is to provide well-rounded consumption of opinions and stances on a particular issue or topic.

This project was done in 36 hours, and was a submission for Hack the North 2015 in Waterloo, Canada.

There is also an agnostic, RESTful backend written in C#, at grind-back.

Check out the demo (forgive the slow page load, the Dyno is probably sound asleep 😴)

it's a small web app built with React and Node. The most interesting part of this project is the UI, because it's a bit unconventional compared to other news consumption web sites. The concept of the UI is based on a stack -- where articles are being 'popped' off the stack one-by-one, and dropped into one of three sentiment categories: negative, neutral, and positive.

The sentiment analysis itself is happening on the backend, using a pretty snazzy machine learning platform called indico. The fetching of the articles/blogs is also happening on the backend using webhose. The backend exposes these as a RESTful interface.

$ cd grind
$ npm install
$ node app.js

watch for subsequent changes with:

$ npm run watch