Rundown

Credits

Rundown

A personal, ad-free news channel for one household or a few friends. It is an unofficial portfolio project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a product of Haystack News or haystack.tv. The screen is modeled on that kind of television playlist: stories you asked for, played straight through.

How playback works

Videos play inside YouTube's official IFrame Player. This app never downloads, rehosts, or hotlinks the media file. When a video ends, the next id in the queue is handed to that same player. Articles are headlines plus a short excerpt from the public feed, and the title is a link to the publisher. Nothing is scraped out of a paywall and nothing is stored except your preferences.

What we keep

A single anonymous profile lives in SQLite and in a cookie on your browser: city, topic and source choices, favorite channels, theme, and whether the queue loops. There is no account, no ad network, and no analytics pixel. Location is optional. If you allow it, the browser sends coordinates to this app, which asks BigDataCloud to name the city and Open-Meteo for the temperature. City search uses Open-Meteo's geocoder.

Channels

  • My Headlines. The topics and sources you picked, newest first, playing straight through.
  • SciTech. Technology, science, and the tools reshaping how the world works.
  • Cybersecurity. Breaches, patches, and the people who chase them. Mostly written reporting.
  • Politics. Campaigns, policy, and the institutions making the day's decisions.
  • Weather. Forecast video and weather headlines for the city saved in your profile.
  • Entertainment. Film, television, and the business around them.
  • International. Reporting from outside a single country's news cycle.
  • Local. Headlines for the city you detected or picked. Links go to the original publishers.

Sources

Feeds are read server-side, cached in memory for about five minutes, and rate-limited so this app does not hammer publishers. A source that fails is skipped. Add another by editing src/lib/sources.ts.

Tech

Cybersecurity

Politics

Weather

  • The Weather Channel

    Weather Channel video explainers. Continuous live streams are skipped.

    Public feed
  • Weather headlines

    Google News RSS weather query for your saved city, plus conditions from Open-Meteo.

    Discovered through Google News RSS for your saved city, then linked out to the publisher.

Entertainment

International

Local

  • Local headlines

    Google News RSS for your saved city. Each headline links out to the publisher.

    Discovered through Google News RSS for your saved city, then linked out to the publisher.

Tools

  • Next.js and Tailwind CSS for the app.
  • rss-parser for RSS and Atom feeds, including YouTube channel feeds.
  • YouTube IFrame Player API for playback and the ended event.
  • Open-Meteo for forecasts and city search.
  • BigDataCloud to turn coordinates into a city name.
  • Node.js built-in SQLite for the preference file. Fonts are self-hosted by Next.js.