Tag: bigcats.org.ua

Last year, I finally automated my big cats news pipeline. I have been searching, sometimes translating, and publishing big cats news since 2007. I quickly found I didn’t have the resources to maintain and extend it myself. Then, at my day job, I started working with AI agents and saw I could manage them the way I manage junior developers. That’s what made my personal project sustainable as a one-person operation, with AI help.

I rebuilt one specific layer: the search itself. I’d hand-coded the rest of the pipeline through 2025: translation, analysis, edit, re-analysis. It was running fine. The search came from NewsCatcherAPI’s free tier for non-commercial projects. The free tier renews every few months, but only if you ask for it and show that the project is still alive and still non-commercial. On 1 September 2025, my access ended. I hadn’t asked them to renew it. By that point I was already overwhelmed by other things and hadn’t returned to the personal project for months.

At the start of 2026, my NewsCatcherAPI subscription started working again for a few days. I don’t know why. Some articles came into my review queue and reminded me the project still existed. By then, I’d been using AI agents at work every day, and I’d started using them for my own coding too. I also remembered a couple of articles on the NewsCatcher blog about how to build a service like theirs from scratch. I decided to direct an AI agent to read those articles and rebuild the search.

For my big cats news service, the entire admin interface lives inside a Telegram chat with a bot. I spend a lot of time in Telegram anyway, so it is the easiest place for me to review, choose, edit, and translate news items.

Each post also needs a photo for the website and social media, plus a caption for visually impaired readers. Sometimes the picture cannot be downloaded directly, even when I try ScraperAPI. This recently forced me to publish a couple of articles by hand.

I have now added a simple workaround. Because the admin panel is already in Telegram, the app can still fetch images that other tools cannot. After the bot sends a draft to the chat, my code checks whether the article already has a local photo file. If it does not, the script downloads the picture from the Telegram message and stores it so the rest of the pipeline can run as usual.

I continue to work on a personal project focused on big cats. As part of it, I have recently launched a newsletter featuring big cat news in English. Subscribe on Facebook, Bluesky, Twitter, or Telegram at @BigCatsNews.

Lately, I have concentrated on developing a reliable system for automatically translating news from English to Ukrainian using various AI models. The process begins with a basic translation model, which is then followed by an analysis step that checks for translation issues and provides suggestions for improvement. These suggestions are applied using a simpler and more cost-effective model. If the advanced model fails to detect translation issues in two consecutive iterations or reaches 16 iterations, the system repeats the process using an even more advanced model.

For the initial translation and analysis, I used DeepSeek R1 for over a month. Although this model offered a good balance between cost and quality, it made several errors, did not always follow instructions, and required frequent prompt adjustments.

Since February 2007, I’ve been manually searching, sometimes translating, and publishing news about big cats — a process that has spanned over 18 years. This process has always been time-consuming, involving extensive manual searching and processing of news articles. For years, I had wished to automate this task, and in the past month, I finally managed to do it in my free time.

I’ve implemented a news search using the API provided by @NewsCatcherAPI, a service with a wide range of news sources. I started by searching for Ukrainian news and found that this service has more Ukrainian sources than other similar APIs. While the number of Ukrainian sources is less than you might find on Google News, it’s still impressive.

@NewsCatcherAPI is free for non-commercial use, which suits my project perfectly since it’s non-commercial. The goal of my project is to popularize and provide fresh information to Ukrainians about big cats and to promote the Ukrainian language. The language is currently under threat from various forces and needs support. Besides, it’s simply pleasant to use my native language.

I set up a library on my site using the BookLibrary component. Yes, the quality of the component leaves much to be desired, since it was originally written for Joomla! 1.0, doesn't use MVC, and everything in the code is jumbled together. But I couldn't find anything better for building a library for Joomla! Plus, thanks to its simplicity, some bits of the code can be tweaked to get proper display and operation. It would also be nice to attach SEF links to it, but after JoomGallery's SEF links that shouldn't be a problem, if only the will were there. If I end up doing it for someone, maybe I'll get around to little details like that — not for nothing did I work on an electronic library for my thesis in my 4th year, only it was in ASP.NET.

I did this not only to explore the component's capabilities, but also to organize my home library. I added only the books I bought myself. Two bookcases of my parents' books, my childhood books, and textbooks would be too much to add to such a catalog. It's a pity that the chance to buy literature for myself came only after I got a computer, by which point I'd almost stopped reading books... The desire is there, but I can't manage to read. The last work of fiction was "When the Mountains Fall (The Eternal Bride)" by Chinghiz Aitmatov, which I read over the course of the winter on a smartphone that I've since lost. I can't recall the work of fiction or non-technical book before that.

Today I added four more books to the library, three of them needed for professional work, and one finally about lions — a book by Craig Packer that more than one article about these big cats references. Here's the link to my library with books about lions and a few technical ones on development.

Since the rss2lj service by david_m got blocked, I decided to figure out how to wire up sending entries to a blog from the site itself via PHP. I immediately found a simple class using XML-RPC, by andreynikishaev. Only the script package itself had no way to send a post to a community and, as it turned out later, there was no way to disable autoformatting of the sent post.

I had to keep searching. I found how to specify the community in the usejournal variable in the LiveJournal API documentation, and there's also a link there about adding metadata to the post in the props variable, which includes disabling autoformatting via the opt_preformatted parameter. Only the class I downloaded didn't allow for passing nested parameters, as I understood it, so I had to rework it a bit, including the class for working with XML-RPC in the main script as well, although I could have downloaded a more advanced solution or written my own, but I didn't want to spend the extra time.

I spent about 4 hours on the whole thing, but most of the time went into adding news formatting for LiveJournal and the check for which news items had already been published. I apologize to those who, before lunch, had a bunch of duplicate news items crawling into their feed from bigcats_ru. But now the entries get sent semi-automatically from the phpBB forum to LiveJournal, and if you set up cron, then automatically. Too bad there's just no time to search for and post news about big cats.

Lately I've gotten interested in search engine optimization, partly for work, partly for myself. It's unpleasant to do something that others won't then see or find out about, unless you spam-advertise it. I don't know how to advertise (the bans in dikie_koshki and the Ukrainian Wikipedia are proof of that, even though I followed the rules as always), and I'm not going to pay for advertising either, so all that's left is optimization.

On the sites I make at work there's not much room to spread out, and they don't always require optimization anyway. But BIGCATS.RU, which I help administer, is a different matter. Though things don't always go smoothly.

I became the third coder to work on the 'Big Cats' news feed script of the BIGCATS.RU web project. I added an RSS feed of the latest forum news to it. Thanks to this, I fully automated the site's news mailing on Subscribe.ru and set up a feed of big cat news to the LiveJournal community bigcats_ru via the bot mbashiri using the rss2lj service.

In short, anyone who wants to read news about big and not-so-big wild cats in their friends feed can follow the community bigcats_ru - News from the lives of big cats or tell those who might find it interesting.