Besides providing me a platform to rant about the latest news, an additional purpose of this site is to provide a curated version of today’s headlines and an archive of previous headlines. If you’d like to set up something like this for yourself, here’s an outline of the procedure to duplicate this site. (This isn’t necessarily the sequence that I followed, because I was working backward from the intended outcome.) This is NOT a detailed description of every step, but it does include the big pieces you’ll need. It’s not simple and it’s not free, but it’s the simplest and cheapest method I could figure out to create my own daily list of headlines.
Domain
You will need to find and register a domain. I was using WordPress.com, but, in order to capture and display news headlines, I needed to use a plugin. To have this capability on WordPress.com requires an upgrade to a plan that costs several hundred dollars annually. However, you can run plugins for free if you use WordPress.org. But, to do this, you must have your own hosted domain url. You can go to GoDaddy or some other domain search company to search for an available domain name and register it. The cost for this will likely be around $10 – $20 per year.
Hosting
You’ll need to host your domain. Several options are available. You can expect to spend around $50 per year. You can use GoDaddy for this as well, but there are many others from which to choose (see recommendations from wordpress.org, wpbeginner.com, and websitesetup.org). Depending on the hosting package, you may have to install WordPress (or, it may come pre-installed). So, the expenses so far are around $60 per year. It’s not free, but some single news sources charge that much just for their content only.
JSON Content Importer
You don’t need to spend a lot of time setting up a fancy website. WordPress has several themes from which to choose. I suggest you choose one that has a static front page. Then, download and activate the JSON Content Importer plugin.
News API
The next step is to go to newsapi.org and get an “API key.” This will allow you to use a hyperlink to generate “JSON” content. The JSON content, in this case, is the news headline data. The challenge is that you need a way to display this data. (You can process the JSON output at jsoneditoronline.org to see what it looks like, but you still need a way to display it on your own website.) This is where the JSON Content Importer comes in. The code can be a bit tricky. Here is a comparison of the JSON Content Importer code using a News API url, the JSON content that it generates, and what the final output looks like:
The code works like this:
If you’re using the latest version of WordPress (using the Gutenberg engine), you can build your headlines by starting with a JSON Content Importer block. Otherwise, you can use the code as shown above.
Jetpack
Finally, if you want to provide an option for people to receive email updates with your headlines, you can install the “Jetpack” plugin. This will give you the option to let people ‘follow’ you or subscribe to your posts. Of course, this assumes that you will turn your daily headlines into posts. I do this by copying and pasting the headline output from the “News” page to my “Old News” page (the blog page). It would be great to find a way to automate this process, but, for now, I just do it manually.
I also like to vent my frustrations with the world by posting my opinions on a blog page. It would be handy to have all of this in one site, but WordPress only likes to have one blog page per site. So, I use the “Old News” page on this site as the blog page to archive headlines and I use the blog page on my old WordPress.com site for my rants. Until I figure out something better, that’s what I have to offer.