News Updates

News Updates is a news portal that writes none of its own news. It collects headlines from other outlets' RSS feeds, sorts them into categories and countries, and sends readers back to the original article.

It has two halves. Readers get a fast, image-led front page with a carousel, category tabs, a "latest" sidebar, a country picker, search, and dark mode. Editors get an admin panel where they set up categories, subcategories, countries, and the feeds behind them, and decide how often each one is checked. Both are one Next.js app on Prisma, with GitHub Actions deploying it to a DigitalOcean server running PM2.

Feeds as configuration

Nothing about the content is hard-coded. A source is a feed URL attached to a subcategory, with an optional country, a priority, and a flag for whether it may appear on the home page. Every subcategory has its own refresh interval. A refresh endpoint checks which subcategories are due and fetches only those. The more sources a subcategory has, the sooner it counts as due, which spreads the fetching out instead of hitting every feed at once.

Feeds disagree about almost everything, images most of all. The parser looks for a picture in the enclosure, then in media:content, then in media:thumbnail, and turns category tags into a plain list. Each article is saved by its normalised URL, so fetching the same story twice updates it instead of adding a copy. That one rule fixed a whole run of duplicate-story bugs.

Deciding what goes on the page

Each feed on the front page is sorted on several levels: the article's own priority, then its source's priority, then either newest first or most endorsed. Readers who sign in can bookmark stories and endorse them, and the endorsement count is what the "popular" tab sorts by. Stories without images are hidden from the home page because they made the grid look broken, and the "last 5 minutes / 30 minutes / hour" sidebar only shows what actually falls inside that window, however quiet that leaves it.

Countries are a filter over sources. Picking a country from the flag dropdown changes which sources count, and with that the categories, tabs, and stories on every page, and the choice is remembered in the browser for the next visit. Headlines in Bengali are detected and set in a Bengali typeface, so the portal can mix languages on one page.

Paying for itself

The portal runs on ads, so clicking a story goes to a short in-between page before the original site. It shows the headline, tags, and an ad slot. Most of the time it moves you on straight away, but now and then it holds you for a ten-second countdown. Ad slots and AdSense placement are managed from the admin panel, and the site carries the privacy, cookie, and legal pages that ad networks require.

The admin panel

The admin area is behind JWT sessions held in a cookie, checked in Next.js middleware. Admin pages redirect to the login screen, and write requests to the admin APIs are refused unless the session belongs to an admin. Reading stays public so the portal can use the same endpoints. From there an editor can reorder countries, turn categories off, link related subcategories, filter long source lists, and set each feed's interval and priority.