Jun 4, 2020

News Website : Milestone : 1000 articles





Last night, I reached a milestone on my hobby website at https://vibhurishi.pythonanywhere.com/

1000 + news items.

Thanks to everyone who sent in suggestions to improve it. Thanks to everyone who have started sending me news items to add that I may have missed ! I am glad you are finding it useful too !

When I had started to code it, I had the idea to have a chronological view of news. If you go to any news website, you see the current news, but its not easy to find out a timeline view of news. For some major events, news sites painstakingly piece together the news. But these are far in between.

Around the end of 2019, I was looking for a means to find out what's happened over the last year. Unfortunately, I could not find any good source. I initially started searching and putting news in an excel. That's when I got the idea - why not try to put it up on a website.

I keep coding a bit on the side - mostly trying to automate bits and pieces in my work line. This was going to be a bit bigger. I have a pretty decent understanding of python programming, and using the django framework, I created the first cut. This is how it looked :

The site has come a long way from that time. Things have been added. Things have been removed. I had to work with a database wipe that happened during the early days. etc.

In the course of last few months, working weekends, I have added :
  • Categories to track big ticket items like Coronavirus or Science. All this is color coded so I can easily see what where.
  • Tags : Initially I had thought that categories would suffice - but there is a lot of different things around the world. It may overlap. A single news item can be categorized under different headings. And hence the tags - which are at the end of each news item. Some cool ones I think are :
  • Coronavirus tracking - this was the most asked for by my friends. I was quite reluctant to do so because so many sites are tracking the disease. So, instead of going all out - I stuck to the minimalist philosophy and put in just a stacked bar chart. Finally added a full list view of all the countries. One nifty thing I leveraged here is the tagging. If you click on the name of a country in the tags at the end of a news link, the page will reload with the covid details of only that country. E.g. India, China, USA etc.
1000 news items may look small, but this has been built up with a few items added every day for the last few months.

Its been an interesting hobby project so far. I am now thinking of how to automate things even further so that not just the viewer, but I also get a readily made news feed. This requires quite a lot of thought and learning newer stuff ! Feel free to send me suggestions in the comments below, on twitter or on LinkedIn !

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