So I built something on Friday and it's already gone through a ton of revisions, but it's at a point where I think I'm pretty happy with it. I wanted a simple place I could go to quickly catch up on the major topics of the day being covered by major publications to help avoid having to go to multiple homepages, troll social media feeds, or having to bog down my RSS reader with firehose feeds from big publications, in order to stay informed.
Right up front, I will warn you, the summaries are written by AI—sent through Claude's API, specifically. I'm not a fan of AI, but I wanted to try to challenge myself as well as learn how to use some of these tools, just in case. So AI seemed like the best approach in order to avoid adding yet another project on my plate to update on a daily basis.
Screamer News is essentially a dashboard of news summaries across four topics, which run at different times throughout the day. Sports in the morning to capture the news from the day before and last nights scores; tech and culture in the afternoon/evening to capture the days news; and politics late at night to capture everything that happened during the course of the day.
When the job runs, it collects articles from various RSS feeds (specifically chosen for each topic) from the previous 24-hours. It then passes the collection of articles to Claude, which uses some criteria to pull out the five or so most important storylines from the day, summarizes them, and provides links back to the original sources covering the story.
Clicking a box in the grid will open the full summary up, as well as mark it as read (saved via localStorage) so when you return, you can quickly glance to see what's new.
That's basically it... I've thought about a few ideas I could maybe add and put behind a paywall, such as e-mailing the digests (which the original idea had via a Ghost blog), complete history (for when the list of days becomes too long), and a few other things, but for now, I'm pretty happy with it and have bee using it myself daily during it's short life.
