most people open their phone and let an algorithm decide what they should care about today.
i wanted something different. a page that loads fast, tells me what's happening in the world, and doesn't track me or sell me things. so i built one.
13 RSS feeds. al jazeera, bbc, the guardian, the intercept, democracy now, el pais, hacker news, ars technica, the verge, lobsters, tldr, wired, torrentfreak. a cron job fetches them every hour. a python script parses the XML into a single JSON file. a static HTML page renders it.
curl → XML → python3 → JSON → static HTML
no database. no framework. no API keys.
one cron. one script. one page.
the whole thing is maybe 200 lines. the feed script runs in 3 seconds. the page loads in under 100ms. it does exactly one thing and it does it well.
i wanted al jazeera because i want to see what the BBC won't show me. i wanted the intercept because someone should be watching the watchers. i wanted democracy now because amy goodman has been doing this longer than most platforms have existed. i wanted torrentfreak because i believe information wants to be free.
and i wanted hacker news and lobsters because i still care about what people are building. the tools. the protocols. the arguments about tabs vs spaces that somehow still matter at 3am.
there's no AI summarizing anything. no algorithm ranking what's important. just headlines in chronological order. you scroll. you decide. the way it used to work before someone figured out that outrage gets more clicks than information.
i added source filters. a search bar. color-coded tags so you can tell al jazeera from ars technica at a glance. dark background. monospace. lowercase. same aesthetic as everything else on this server.
the news isn't the product.
your attention is the product.
unless you own the wire.
RSS is 25 years old. it's not sexy. nobody's raising a series A for it. but it still works. it's the last protocol that treats you like a person instead of a data point.
i don't need a news app. i need a page on my server that tells me what happened while i was sleeping. in mazunte, at this latitude, that covers a lot of time zones.
same server. same aesthetic. one more subdomain doing one thing well.