personalNews

Your news - as a timeline. In chronological order.

PersonalNews is a small web application, you can host on your own server. You can run it as an application on your mobile device as well. This way you are always getting the latest of your favorite news. You'll always be up to date.

personalNews on the iPhone
personalNews on the iPhone

Features

  • add your own selection of RSS or Atom-Feeds
  • group several feeds into channels
  • news are ordered chronologically
  • dark mode 🌗
  • possibility to blacklist words
  • runs in every browser
  • ... or even in a webpanel in Vivaldi
  • perfect for mobile devices

Why I built this

I'm always swapping browsers and of course I'm also a user of Vivaldi. Vivaldi has a lot of smart features and one of them are webpanels. Think of webpanels as an overlay you can open anytime, that contains an additional url. I think Vivaldi is the first browser to implement something like this.

I've added twitter, Hacker news and pocket as webpanels and I'm pretty happy with it. But one thing was still missing - a newsfeed that'll only display news I'm interested in.

So I did what every other developer would possibly do as well - I've built my own solution. I then decided to design and develop personalNews. At that time, it was important to me that the feed should run in a Vivaldi web panel - so I started with a mobile first approach. The site is now responsive and can also be used in the browser or as a standalone application as well.

And I've updated the backend to act as an API as well, so you could build your own frontend on it.

If you want to know some more details about the development you can read more here

What were my goals at that time?

  • Build and easy way to skim the news I'm interested in.
  • The news should get sorted in a chronological order (think of twitter)
  • I often look at the newsfeed in the night - so automatic dark mode is a must
  • I wanted to learn new things.
  • I always aim for performance and this means avoid using bloated frameworks. Everything was built from scratch using HTML, CSS, vanilla JavaScript and PHP for the backend

Building this was a lot of fun, and I hope you can find this tools as useful as I and some other people do.