Dada: Text-only Local News
Status: CLOSED
I haven’t had a real chance to work on this project. Now that I’m making it public, and it’s already dead!
The premise would have been simple: text-only news sites.
For more experienced developers, the implementation would have been simple, too.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Dada was a working title for this project.1 It’s based on the Filipino expression, “Puro ka dada! (You’re full of empty talk!)”
Now, by all means, this concept won’t be empty talk. What I hope it would be, though, is text only.
The four news sites worth considering for now are:
- Inquirer (INQ)
- Manila Bulletin (MB)
- Philippine Star (PHS)
- Rappler (RAP)
I know that there are other online newspapers in the Philippines, but I’ll be focusing my efforts in these four.
go to top ⤒Why? Why not?
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News websites are needlessly heavy. Ours here in the Philippines, more so. According to GTMetrix, the weight of each site is:
Site Compressed Uncompressed INQ 8.4 MB 18.7 MB MB 5 MB 11.3 MB PHS 3.3 MB 12.9 MB RAP 3 MB 7.4 MB That’s an average of ~5 MB (~12.6 MB uncompressed)!
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As we demand for better internet speeds from our service providers, we should also design lightweight websites. A news site, by drastically reducing the weight of its webpages, will be more accessible, as is its purpose!
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No ads, trackers, pop-ups, videos, graphics, interactive elements. It will be a boring site, which is good: no one needs to consume news 24/7.
Inspiration
Text-only news sites are not new. Here are some, that are still live and kept up to date:
go to top ⤒Abandoning the Project (for now?)
I personally don’t want to make something I wouldn’t regularly use.
Now, I’m not a fan of news sites to begin with, nor do I consume news all that much.
go to top ⤒Recommendations
- Implement this using a POSIX shell script. Scrape content from news sites, and format it in HTML + CSS on the local machine, before pushing to live server.
- Implement this using Python, possibly by combining Beautiful Soup and Flask.
- Implement by using your favorite programming language (C and Go comes to mind).
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While one could make connections, this is entirely different from the art movement of similarly spelled name. ↩︎
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