This was supposed to be Day 2, but ended up taking me about 3-4 days to get to the current state.
The problem I wanted to solve is that basically, I am addicted to Twitter. I get my news from Twitter, so I'm constantly pulling it up and scrolling through it throughout the day. But there's a lot of noise on Twitter--a ton of low quality content, mean-spirited comments, and so on. I wanted a way to stay on top of the news that met the following criteria:
1. One place to see new articles/posts from a bunch of different sources. I didn't want to have to pull up each news site individually.
2. No comments or noise--just the latest headlines.
3. Customizable - I can add new sources I come across, group them in different ways by subject.
4. Public - If someone else added some interesting news sites, it would be cool to see that and find something new to follow myself.
5. No authentication - Handling passwords and user state is a pain. Just let everyone see everything!
So I made "PaperPup" (the name came from the idea of your dog fetching you the morning paper). While there are other RSS aggregators out there, a lot of them feel clunky to me and don't necessarily have the public aspect I wanted. In technical terms, it's a Rails API backend with a "kind-of-vanilla" HTML/CSS/JQuery single-page front-end. As I mentioned I'm not really a software engineer, so this is nothing fancy; I wanted to make sure my skills on some of the basics were still up-to-date rather than experimenting with whatever the hot new languages/frameworks are these days.
Anyway, I hope you all like it! If you have any suggestions or questions (technical, feature-wise, or other apps to use), I'd love to hear them.