In my last post, I described how I managed the various reporting formats of COVID-19 data across countries in order to implement a dashboard that displayed COVID cases by province for every country in the world.
This post is a quick follow-up, describing the challenges I have encountered since that point, and why I have decided to move on without completing this project.
Looking back, I started this project in mid-May, back when there were relatively few APIs dedicated to sharing COVID data, and relatively few dashboards. At that point, I felt that my design filled a need (country comparison) that was not easily fulfilled by other dashboards. Since then, the amount of data has exploded (especially in the United States), as well as the number of dashboards allowing users to directly interact with the data.
Although I have loved working on this project as a learning endeavor and have many more features I would like to implement, it is time to put this project to rest in its current state. Unfortunately, the API I have been using for the country-comparison dashboard has become a paid subscription service, and the free version has instituted rate-limiting. As a result, my program works intermittently, and often throws errors when it is unable to fetch current data. I could pay $10 per month to get it up and running again with a paid subscription, but since there are so many COVID dashboards out there already, I decided its time to move on to my next project.
If you've stumbled upon my previous posts, the URL for the site is still up, but be prepared for inconsistency in fetching data, and incomplete United States state-by-state data due to the rate-limiting issue.
Although my API situation is a disappointment, it's time to move on! I'm currently looking for new ideas to create my next data dashboard project. What should I build next? Please leave ideas in the comments below!
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