Alright, let me tell you about this thing I called “shortstop news”. It wasn’t some official thing, just a little project I cooked up myself a while back.
See, I was getting totally swamped with news. Every site, every app, just throwing tons of stuff at me. Most of it felt like noise. I just wanted the important bits, like, fast. Like a shortstop grabbing a line drive before it gets through, you know? That was the idea.
Getting Started
So, I figured, how hard could it be? I thought I’d just grab headlines from a few reliable places using their RSS feeds. Super simple. I started messing around with some Python scripts. First step, pull down the feeds. That part was easy enough. Lots of guides online for that.
Then I needed to figure out what was “shortstop” worthy. What’s the key info? I tried filtering by keywords, looking for certain patterns. Maybe news that multiple sources reported? I spent ages tweaking these filters.
Hitting Problems
Man, that turned into a mess quickly. What’s “important”? Important to who? What I thought was key, my buddy wouldn’t care about. The filters were either letting too much junk through or blocking stuff that actually mattered later.
And the sources… some sites updated constantly, others barely. Some had messy feeds. Some changed their structure and broke my scripts. It felt like patching leaky pipes all the time. I wasn’t getting quick, clean news; I was just wrestling with code and inconsistent data.
It wasn’t stopping anything; it was just creating more work for me.
Trying Other Stuff
Okay, plan A wasn’t working. I thought maybe I needed smarter tech. Looked into some fancy natural language processing stuff, maybe AI could figure out the important news? But honestly, that was way over my head for a quick side project. The tools were complicated, needed lots of data, and I just didn’t have the time or energy to go that deep.
I even tried just limiting it to very few sources, like maybe just the top headline from three specific sites. That was better, less noise, but then I felt like I was missing too much. It wasn’t a “shortstop”; it was more like only watching one part of the field and ignoring the rest.
Where It Ended Up
In the end, I just… stopped. The “shortstop news” project sits in a folder on my old hard drive somewhere. It never became the clean, fast news catcher I imagined. It just became another half-finished project.
It kinda taught me something, though. Trying to filter the whole world’s news down to perfect little nuggets is maybe impossible, or at least way harder than it looks. There’s no magic bullet. What’s important is messy and changes all the time. Sometimes you just gotta wade through the noise yourself, I guess. Or just accept you’ll miss stuff. That project definitely didn’t solve my news overload problem. If anything, it just gave me another thing to feel slightly frustrated about for a few months.
