Why did I decide to create a news generator for Kindle?

11 Mar 2021

World around us is changing, changing by a lot. So does good journalism. Several years ago good journalists were employed by some prominent newspaper. You can just read that paper(web site) and that’s about it as I prefer to read my news stories. Reading gives you flexibility to imagine world author is writing about unlike television where everything is defined for you. Television on the other hand has always been a money making machine, so newspapers decided to follow suit, bringing their corporate interests forward. That’s where our story starts

Newspapers has joined large media conglomerates or has become one, they joined fights between media companies, which sometimes seemed like proxy war betwen their owners. They invested a lot into polarization of us, Americans, and were doing everything to put us against each other. That’s where journalists has a choice to make either get on one side with paper owners or leave. Ability to independently think and investigate story no matter what corporate interest of media company you work for is quite essential for good journalist and many good ones had left those companies and has become independent and readers followed. For many of us it’s not a paper that represented good journalism it’s authors themselves who took us on a “trips” through out their pieces. That’s how those authors build their audience in a first place.

World has become hectic, you have to subscribe to 25 different sites and platforms where to follow your favorite authors. As for me I prefer to consume my news in a “paper” or as close to “paper” version as possible, with a cup of coffee in the morning while world is still asleep. You can enjoy that silence around you, sitting in a chair and sipping your espresso and you know that in few minutes you would have to jump on that train of life, you would have to help your kiddos get ready for school, you have to hop on meetings and so on, but you still have few minutes to enjoy your early morning in that peaceful state. That’s how I like to read my news, alone, in a cozy place without any disturbance and that’s why computer does not work, as you can get easily distracted. Same with phone, you can’t resist to answer that email/sms … that’s where I looked at my Kindle. There is gotta be a way I thought to myself, and if not I’ll find a way, I have skills to make that happen.

Task is quite simple line up bunch of RSS feeds and create a PDF or something to get on to your Kindle and viola you can enjoy your peace reading good story. I have started looking around, why build bicycle if it has been built already. And I came across a project that was building and sending mobi files over email to your Kindle. I just didn’t like part of sending emails, as it will require you to store access to your SMTP server which creates entirely different set of issue. As a result I’ve decided to cut it, then being a developer in my heart I’ve started optimizing code pieces I didn’t like. All of that turned into complete rewrite, that fits my needs, instead of sending emails over quite questionable Amazons whispering system I have decided to add web server so that I can actually download files generated by this service to prevent mess on my Kindle. Meet MyNewsGenerator

All in all I really like results so much that I’ve decided to write detailed blog post about it. Also I have several ideas on how to move this project forward add few more features and for now I can enjoy my no-distraction way of reading thoughtful articles from good journalists.