Feedscanner

Tribune News Service (TNS) syndicates content from over 80 newspaper websites. The editors of TNS daily monitor these websites for new content to include in the Tribune News Service. (You could say that TNS is a hand-curated distribution of the news).

Many TNS editors manually visit each of the websites every day in search of content for their assigned topic area.

To help with the hours it takes to load up each website manually, I developed a website that aggregates all the articles into one screen.

I’m a big Tweetdeck user, so I designed the UI of this site very much with the functionality of Tweetdeck in mind. Every column holds the latest content from each newspaper.

In this example, this is the business screen for the TNS business editor. All the business stories from his publications get loaded into WordPress on this page.

Most newspapers continue to offer RSS feeds of their content—in most cases, the feeds are specific to topic areas, like business. I built this WordPress install to ingest the newspaper feeds into WordPress. Each article is saved as a post within WordPress. Every two minutes, the feeds are checked and imported into WordPress.

The frequency is important because the TNS editors need to see the latest news. We could not rely on services like Feedly that import the sources on their time schedule. We needed tight control on the frequency—hence building this custom tool in WordPress.

The editors love this tool. Seeing all their sources in one place is an immense help, saving many hours daily.