Tag: news

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.

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.