GetRead.in - Design and Development
October 4, 2015Back in 2015, we developed getread.in that solved one problem we personally faced: an easy way to subscribe to our favourite author and get their latest articles in our mailbox. In the beginning, our focus was solely on political authors.
Most of the indian publications didn’t have any way of doing this natively. Besides, their RSS feeds situation was abysmal – either they didn’t have one or it was buried deep somewhere.
A bird’s eye view
What we wanted was to observe the most popular authors on the sites where they published and then deliver the post either immediately or in a digest, as preferred by our users.
- Our scrapper job periodically checks each author’s page on a publication.
- When a new article gets posted, we scrap the title, date, an excerpt, etc.
- This would immediately show up on our site.
- A mailer job regularly sends out digest mails or immediate alerts for new posts to our users.