A few years ago, I built a simple news aggregator. Now Im finally bringing it back.

Jadedgamer was a mostly single page news website that allowed you to quickly scan headlines of the most popular news outlets. I liked to consider it the front-page of video game news. Probably a little pretentious, I know. The entire site was built in Python & Django, and hosted on Heroku. It had some basic search functionality, and user login/customization.

I originally envisioned the project to be a sort of online community. A kind of side hustle that could make a little money. But, I never really had the time or energy to promote it the way I needed to, and it eventually fell to the wayside.

Full time work and other projects put the site on hold. Thanks to quarantine, it’s given me a chance to revisit the project.

While Im thankful to still have full-time work, being stuck inside has put a lot of other projects on hold for the time being. With video games being more popular than ever, and by ever growing hatred of twitter, its hard to keep up with everything that’s happening. With things like Animal Crossing dominating the news, I barely caught wind of the Assassin’s Creed Valhalla reveal.

And right now, I just kind of just want a place I can read about entertainment, with out reading about pandemics, death, and our idiot president (don’t @ me).

So, with out further ado, I present the new Jadedgamer.com. At first glance, it’s still pretty much the same. Im not planning on changing the look or feel. I want it to stay simple; text heavy with the ability to scan multiple feeds quickly.

However, I have completely rewrote the backend. The site has been completely rewritten in React.JS, with a RESTful API. One of he new features I hope to add is to make it developer friendly. I love the idea of letting anyone else have access to the dataset Ive been slowly curating, and analyzing and creating new things with it.

Roadmap

So where to things stand right now, and where is development headed? Right now Im on phase 1. Im still working on getting everything running smoothly on AWS’s server-less Lamba stack. The site also currently only still access RSS feeds. With some sites not even having RSS anymore, this leads to some issues with connecting to Youtube or Twitch. So the next priority will be adding more support for other types of feeds- JSON, API connections, etc.

Phase II

During phase II, I’ll be creating a Patreon/ko-fi/community platform and accepting input from others. As I mentioned I want to make this as developer friendly and open as possible, so I’ll also be opening up documentation for the jadedgamer API.

While it hasn’t come at the most ideal time, I’m excited to see how this evolves over the next few months. For now, you can follow Jadedgamer’s development right here on A Life Well Played.