Covid news api

“An API that provides covid news from different sources around the world. Made using nodejs and express.”

01. What the Project Is

The Covid News API is a specialized backend microservice engineered during the 2019-2020 global pandemic. Originally conceived while I was teaching myself React to build a live global tracking dashboard—which monitored death rates, vaccination rollouts, and recovery milestones—this project evolved to solve a specific content delivery problem. It functions as an automated data aggregation pipeline that parses, indexes, and delivers real-time, context-specific global health news modules through unified API streams.

Covid news api_01.png

A github readme documentation for the project

02. Why Technical Choices Were Made

While building the frontend dashboard component, I searched commercial API marketplaces for reliable health journalism feeds. Unfortunately, the available options were heavily gatekept by strict enterprise paywalls or plagued with structural data formatting bugs. Driven by the need for clean, uncensored telemetry data, I took it upon myself to learn web scraping. This pivot allowed me to circumvent external financial constraints and maintain absolute control over the content schema parsing engines.

03. How It Was Implemented

The service was built entirely on a lightweight TypeScript stack to ensure static type safety across data ingestion pipelines. I coupled Axios for raw HTML networking sweeps with Cheerio to execute rapid DOM traversal and element extraction routines on target media servers. The scraped payloads are sanitized and exposed via an Express.js routing controller matrix. For deployment, I packaged the runtime for Render's container layer and hooked the live environment directly into the public RapidAPI Marketplace marketplace index.

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