The News Desk
Introduction
I have wanted to build a news aggregator for some time - I keenly follow the news and believe its important to get your information from a variety of sources. I felt there was a few options out there for something similar but nothing that blew me away from a UI perspective.
Purpose and Goals
I wanted a product that looked good and served a purpose. To allow speedy production, I chose to borrow the UI heavily from the Guardian website. I also wanted to get more familiar working with Next.js and its static and server side rendering capabilities.
Spotlight
Post are fetched from the APIs via getStaticProps in the relevant page - the whole site is then triggered to rebuild at 4am GMT every day. So we have a balance between super fast loading when accessed by the user but also the news feed is refreshed daily with up to date news.
Lessons Learned
I learnt a lot about trade-offs - for example the UI aspect and what would be the best method to refresh the feed. How the UI displays each of the specific news articles took some to-ing and fro-ing to find the best method for the various layouts so that was a fun challenge to overcome!