Alright, let’s talk about this little project I started calling the salone trendtracker. It wasn’t some grand plan, really. I just found myself trying to keep up with what folks were talking about back home, you know, in Sierra Leone. Reading news sites one by one, scrolling through feeds… it got tiring pretty fast.
So, I thought, there has to be a better way. Just something simple to give me a quick look at what’s bubbling up. My first step was basically just brainstorming. Where does chatter happen? News comments, maybe some specific online forums, social media tags. I wasn’t aiming for rocket science, just wanted to gather mentions.
Getting Started with the Gathering
I started manually, believe it or not. Just bookmarking sites and checking them daily. That lasted about two days. Too much work. Then I figured, okay, maybe I can automate this a little. I looked into some tools, things that can pull headlines or watch for keywords. Didn’t want to build anything complex myself from scratch, not for this anyway.
I ended up trying a couple of simple feed readers and alert systems. Basically told them:
- Look for mentions of “Sierra Leone”, “Freetown”, “Salone”.
- Check these specific news sources I trust (mostly local ones).
- Maybe keep an eye on a couple of popular hashtags people use.
Setting it up was fiddly. Some tools worked okay, others just pulled in a lot of junk. Filtering was the real pain. You get so much noise, old news popping up, or stuff that just mentions the country in passing but isn’t really about it.
Making Sense of the Mess
After getting the raw stuff coming in, the next job was trying to see actual trends. Just getting a list of articles or posts isn’t that helpful. I wanted to see what topics were appearing repeatedly or getting more buzz than others. This part is still pretty rough, honestly.
I tried grouping similar headlines together. If five different sites were talking about, say, a new government policy, I wanted that to stand out. This turned out harder than I thought. News gets reported differently, titles change, so matching them up automatically? Tricky. I ended up doing a lot of manual sorting initially, just scanning the list the tools gave me each morning.
Right now, my “trendtracker” is basically a glorified digest. It pulls stuff together, I quickly scan it, and manually pick out what looks like a real trend or a hot topic for the day or week. It’s not fancy. It’s definitely not perfect. Sometimes I miss things, sometimes I flag something that fizzles out.
But, you know what? It works for me. It’s better than drowning in browser tabs. It gives me that quick snapshot I was looking for, even if I have to do some of the final filtering myself. It’s a work in progress, like most things. Maybe one day I’ll make it smarter, but for now, it serves its purpose. Just a simple way to keep a finger on the pulse, more or less.
