Happening24 is a news aggregator web app that curates news from different sources. This was a side project of mine.
It started as an experiment to see if it would work. I wanted to build a
website that could generate traffic, which I could then monetize.
... Simple.
It was clear to me what I wanted to achieve, so I began searching for open-source code to get started. Fortunately, I found something that perfectly matched my requirements. After that, I added some features to the existing code, but they didn't work as expected, so I had to remove them.
After trying different approaches, I finally got the front end working as
I wanted. The next challenge was to source the news. I explored various
APIs, but they were not free, so that option didn't work.
Fortunately, during my research on news APIs, I came across a PDF file
containing RSS feeds for news media companies from around the world.
Now that I had access to feeds from any news source in the world, the next
challenge was integrating them into my app. The feeds were in XML format,
which doesn't work well with React, so I needed to convert them into a
usable format.
JSON was the solution. After trying a couple of libraries, I found one
that could effectively convert RSS feeds into JSON format. I used this
library to display the news in the app.
As you can see in the images above, the traffic peaked initially and then
started declining.
So, what went wrong?
Quite a few things, actually.
The first issue I encountered was that the app was built with React, a
client-side framework, which isn't ideal for SEO. As a result, I had to
continuously increase my efforts to improve SEO to see any results.
The second issue was the high API request time. To fetch news for the home
page, my server had to request the news RSS feed, convert it to JSON, and
then send the response back to the client. This entire process was
lengthy, making it inefficient and slow.
The third issue was with the service I used to host my server, a free
service called Cyclic. Unfortunately, the company shut down, and my server
went down with it.
If given more time or resources, here's what I would do: The first thing I would do is ensure the server is live at all times. Next, I would switch to a more SEO-friendly technology.
I've also developed iPostbox, a web application designed for sharing letters and documents online. This platform, built using React and the PDFTron SDK, enables users to send and receive digital correspondence and files.