Alright, so today I’m gonna walk you through this little project I tinkered with called “yips news.” It’s nothing fancy, just a simple news aggregator, but I learned a bunch building it, so I figured I’d share the dirt.
First things first, the idea. I was tired of bouncing around a million different sites to get my news fix. Plus, I wanted something tailored to my specific interests, not just whatever the algorithms were shoving down my throat. So, I thought, “Why not build my own?”
Then came the tech stack. I decided to keep it relatively simple. Python for the backend – because who doesn’t love Python? – with the requests library for grabbing the news and Beautiful Soup for parsing it. For storing the data, I went with SQLite. It’s lightweight, easy to set up, and perfect for a small project like this. On the frontend, I opted for plain old HTML, CSS, and a dash of JavaScript. No need for fancy frameworks here.
Next, I had to figure out where to get the news. This involved a lot of research, finding reliable RSS feeds, and making sure they were actually parsable. Some sites are a real pain in the butt with their formatting, let me tell you! I ended up focusing on a handful of sites that consistently provided clean, well-structured feeds. Basically, I just Googled “tech news rss feed” and similar searches, then tested each one to see if it worked.
The coding itself was pretty straightforward. I started by writing a script to fetch the RSS feeds, parse them with Beautiful Soup, and extract the relevant information – title, link, description, and publication date. Then, I wrote another script to store this data in the SQLite database. I created a simple table with columns for each of those fields.
The biggest headache was dealing with inconsistent data. Some feeds used different date formats, others had weird HTML encoding issues. I had to add a bunch of error handling and data cleaning logic to make sure everything was consistent before storing it in the database. Regular expressions became my best friend (and sometimes my worst enemy!).
For the frontend, I built a basic HTML page that pulled the data from the database and displayed it in a list. I used a bit of JavaScript to add some basic filtering and sorting functionality. Nothing groundbreaking, but it got the job done. I just wanted a clean list of headlines with links to the original articles.
Scheduling was important. I set up a cron job to run the script that fetches and updates the news every hour. That way, I always have the latest headlines without having to manually run the script myself.
Finally, I deployed it. I just threw it on a cheap VPS I had lying around. It’s not meant for massive scale or anything, just my personal use.
Lessons learned? Data cleaning is a pain, but it’s crucial. Also, simple is often better. I could have used a fancy framework for the frontend, but keeping it simple made the project much easier to manage and maintain. And finally, building something yourself, even something small, is way more satisfying than just using something off the shelf.
What’s next? I’m thinking about adding support for more news sources, maybe even incorporating some machine learning to personalize the news feed further. But for now, I’m happy with my little “yips news” aggregator. It does exactly what I need it to do.
