Real-time RSS news aggregator

wrestle.buzz is a PHP and JavaScript web app I built that presents a ‘river’ of pro wrestling news, inspired by sites like Techmeme and NBA River. It uses SimplePie as the RSS feed parser, and Google’s natural language API analyzeEntities method to parse news headlines and generate a real-time trending-topic list. (You can use a simple curl command to test the API for yourself.)

To provide a real-time experience the app checks the Google API and RSS output asynchronously at regular intervals: the user is notified in a button that there are ‘x new updates’. It aims to be similar to the Guardian’s ‘Live’ pages.

For me it’s a great way to keep up with what’s happening in the frequently wacky world of pro wrestling. It got some good feedback on r/SquaredCircle, too.

On a technical level, while it’s not the most complex app in the world I thought I should nonetheless create a high-level ‘software architecture’ flowchart before I forget how it all works. I used the free tool Excalidraw to create it. PNG below; SVG here.

I have a couple of updates in the planning so I can refer back to this to keep my bearings.