---
layout: project
title: "Informinator"
description: News aggregator built with Python, AioHTTP, and Jinja
thumbnail_url: /assets/images/informinator.webp
project_url: https://informinator.owenryan.us/
# TODO: Uncomment this when source code is published
# source_url: https://code.owenryan.us/owenryan/informinator
SEO_tags: [Python, aiohttp, News]
---

Informinator is the one-stop site for all of your news needs! It aims to be a central hub that delivers the stories you
need to know while also funneling you to the proper news sources to get more information. Informinator is currently in
a very early beta and only sources news from Al Jazeera, BBC News, The Associated Press, and editorials from The
Guardian.

**Note: Informinator will be open-sourced in the next few weeks when the server is stable**

## Origins

During the spring 2023 semester, two separate classes I was taking had weekly news quizzes that checked that you had
been following current events. I decided that the best way to study for these quizzes was to create a news aggregator
to simplify the process of looking at several news outlets per day.

## Current issues

The first version of Informinator was hacked together over a weekend, so some design choices are suboptimal. Some of these include:

- All articles are loaded on page-load, even though most are hidden behind the carousel.
- Informinator's RSS parsing code only supports feeds from [RSSHub](https://docs.rsshub.app/en/).
  - RSSHub's New York Times English feed is currently unusable due to [a parsing error](https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub/issues/12371).
- All articles are cached in Python when an in-memory database such as Redis would greatly improve performance.

## Roadmap

Informinator's public roadmap can be found [here](https://informinator.owenryan.us/roadmap).