So today I’m gonna talk about how I tried making my own news thing called “edna news” after getting totally fed up with all the garbage news sites out there. These big sites kept pushing clickbait and weird political stuff I didn’t care about, so I thought screw it, I’ll build my own.
The Starting Point
First off I grabbed my laptop at like 2 AM and opened VSCode. Started looking up how normal people scrape news sites without getting blocked – cause turns out websites hate when you take their stuff. Found this Python library called BeautifulSoup after googling “steal website data easy way”. Took me three hours just to get the damn thing installed properly.
Hitting Walls
Then came the actual coding part. I wrote some scraper scripts that looked something like this:
- Made a list of 10 news sites I actually read
- Wrote messy code trying to grab headlines
- Kept getting blocked after two tries
- Added random sleep timers between requests
Still didn’t work half the time. My terminal kept screaming 403 errors like it was personal. At this point I almost smashed my keyboard.
The Ugly Fixes
Changed tactics completely after wasting two weekends. Found some free news APIs instead of scraping – surprise, they all want money after 100 requests. Tried three different ones:
- First one gave only celebrity gossip
- Second one returned empty JSON after setup
- Third one required credit card for trial
Finally patched together four free tiers from different providers. The output looked like someone vomited news – no formatting, random languages popping up, duplicate stories everywhere.
Present Day Mess
Now edna news technically exists at a local address on my home server. It takes 14 seconds to load and displays headlines like:
- CAT STUCK IN TREE (from 2018)
- Bitcoin to moon!!! (spam site)
- Actual local weather alert (useful but hidden)
My wife asked why I looked so tired last month? Cause I stayed up rotating API keys when limits got hit. Honestly might scrap the whole thing and just buy a newspaper subscription.
But hey, at least now I know exactly why news sites suck – building one’s impossible without a damn team and budget. The end.
