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I got fed up with Google News a year or so ago, over the echo chamber that the news site has become. It motivated me to create https://statesreport.com https:/
by sterban 9y ago
I got fed up with Google News a year or so ago, over the echo chamber that the news site has become. It motivated me to create https://statesreport.com https://statesreport.com, with no ads and no tracking.
- TaylorAlexander 9y agoI’d never heard of your site but I just checked it out. I’ve got to say it looks really nice. I’ll bookmark it and try to use it. Thanks for making it!
- sterban 9y agoThank you for the nice feedback!
- e15ctr0n 9y agoGreat job with the news website! Where do you get the news from and what stack are you using on the website?
- sterban 9y agoThe server is written in Go. The news scraper is written in python. I don't have the full list of sites offhand, but I'll try and get back to this comment!
- e15ctr0n 9y agoSo your Python scraper has a list of websites whose home pages it scrapes?
- sterban 9y agoIt mainly uses RSS feeds versus HTML scraping, but there are a couple of news sources where HTML is required.
- e15ctr0n 9y agoYou wrote elsewhere that your output HTML is highly optimized. I viewed the source of the page and I can see that it contains the CSS inside <style> tags and images embedded as base64 encoded text - what software do you use to generate this output?
- sterban 9y agoThe python scraper base64 encodes all the images, so that data is prepared for the web server. The python library being used is PIL. The CSS is hand-written in a Go template. The goal was to have all the rendering done in a single request, so I choose to embed the CSS and relax the CSP on styles.
- e15ctr0n 9y agoThank you for sharing. This is seriously cool stuff. Please write all this up in a blog post and do a Show HN. :-)
- switch007 9y agoBTW, the CSS for 'p' has 'sans-serif-light' but I don't have that (or the others) on Chrome/Debian, which results in my default (which happens to be Serif).
- sterban 9y agoThank you! I will make sure that gets included in future testing.
- aylmao 9y agoNice site! Big fan. Out of curiosity, are you monetizing it in any way? Expect increased traffic after this HN post? How are you making sure we don't empty your pockets?
- sterban 9y agoNo, and no plans to. If costs become an issue, I will ask for donations to fund. It's heavily optimized, so I think it can handle the spike!
- 24gttghh 9y agoWow this works without whitelisting anything in noscript. Thank you!
- sterban 9y agoThanks, that was the goal!
- scottybowl 9y agoAre you open to creating an API for us to query for https://www.chooseholly.com https://www.chooseholly.com? We currently pull data from Bings API for our Discover feature. Happy to pay for usage :)
- ChuckMcM 9y agoInteresting, I just opened your site and it has nearly the exact same list of articles/headlines/sources that my Google News page has. I wonder what is different about my settings and the settings of those who feel their news feed is highly edited. Generally for news I prefer Blendle, and no I don't mind paying per story although I think some papers are pretty extreme in what they think their journalism is worth.
- nwsm 9y agoThis looks great, thank you. Consider a donation button.
- sterban 9y agoI certainly will in the future. Thank you for the kind feedback!