Games Newswire, a news aggregator he built
James created Games Newswire, https://newswire.games ("News aggregated from across the web"). Recorded as his build; the games industry itself stays out of scope for research (work-out-of-scope), so sessions should not follow this page into industry analysis.
How it is built (James, 2026-10-26). Made during his spring break in 2026. A pipeline of "4 scripts in a trenchcoat":
- pulls RSS feeds from games media sites;
- extracts the article text with Trafilatura;
- deduplicates stories, grouping articles from different sites that cover the same story;
- uses Claude Haiku to write the summaries, and detects themes, categories and so on;
- organises content into platforms/hardware, publishers, games and "other";
- builds the static site with Hugo.
It runs on his Coolify box at Hetzner (home-infrastructure).
Author's reading: the same shape as his other builds, deterministic plumbing with an LLM confined to one bounded step (the prose summary), as in astrology-product and mgr; see harness-idiom.
What it does (observed on the live site, 2026-10-26):
- Clusters coverage of the same story from several outlets into one item, shows how many sources it drew on ("4 sources"), and gives each item its own rewritten headline and a several-paragraph synthesised summary with context. The summaries are written by Claude Haiku (James).
- Publishes a daily front page with a dated archive (one page per day).
- Indexes every story by category and by entity: eleven categories (Culture, Events, Game Coverage, Hardware, Industry, Legal, People, Platform News, Publisher News, Studio News, Technology; tallies summing to about 39,800 on 26 Oct 2026), plus browsable indexes of individual games, studios, publishers, platforms and themes, each with a story count.
- Served by nginx as a static Hugo site; no about page.
Use in this system. Its headlines feed James's daily morning briefing alongside The Guardian (morning-briefing, private).
Not yet recorded: what it is for (personal tool, public service or experiment), and whether he sees it as connected to convivial-computation. Ask James.
Live: re-check with James before relying on this.
Provenance: that he created it, James (memory migration note, 2026-10-11); how it is built and hosted, James in conversation, 2026-10-26; features from the live site, read 2026-10-26. Disposition: live.
Related: morning-briefing, home-infrastructure, harness-idiom, work-out-of-scope