This is the 2nd launch from Product Habits. View more
Product News
Your daily dose of product news
Product News is the quickest way to get your daily dose of the latest in Product 💪 all from one place. Includes over 50 (and growing!) of the best sources for all things Product. Handpicked tweets, blog posts and other Product resources are posted throughout the day.
Today, I’m excited to launch a little product I’ve always wanted to exist. Think of it as a Techmeme for Product News. A way to stay up to date with what’s going on in the world of Product without having to visit dozens of website every day. Curated by me 🤓
This all came about because of a tweet from @mubashariqbal that I eagerly responded to. He wanted to get out of the cold weather and hack on something, so I offered him a ticket to fly to San Francisco. He didn’t take me up on the plane ticket. Instead he decided to build Product News out based on an idea I’ve had for far too long, since I began curating content.
Please share your favorite Product related blogs and twitter accounts in the comments. We’ve got over 50 and are adding new sources daily.
@hnshah One of my goals this year was to work with more makers to launch their ideas.
I didn't think it would be @hnshah, but Twitter has a magical way of making things happen that you didn't think were possible 😀
It was great to work with Hiten and Marie on building Product News, they have a great passion for anything product related and it shows any time you're talking with them.
@hnshah@mubashariqbal@marie_prokopets
i love you all's dedication to sourcing up-and-coming writers and content creators, and i know i've personally been a beneficiary, so thank you! highlighting fresh voices is such an important part of moving the story forward.
could you talk about the tools you've built on the backend that we don't see to make curation easier?
It's pretty simple. @mubashariqbal built a three part system:
1. Sources: We are able to add sources. Blogs via RSS, Medium Authors, Medium Publications and Twitter accounts.
2. Queue: Posts and tweets from the sources are added to a queue and they can be rejected or published. There is an option to edit the post headline and description as well.
3. Public Page: This is the front-end interface everyone sees. Once a post is published, it shows up on the public page at the top.
@hnshah Just to add a little more technical detail:
The system was custom built using the Laravel PHP framework.
We use RSS feeds, Twitter and Medium APIs to gather the content for curation.
// @smalter
@hnshah@mubashariqbal that curation tool sounds useful!
@zhu_mink and i built www.keysheet.io, which curates expert reviews of cryptocurrencies. our data set that we curate from is very similar, which is specific individuals on twitter, medium and personal websites.
currently, our curation tools are:
- we add twitter handles to twitter lists and search those lists with copy-pasted search queries.
- we add medium sites and personal websites to a google custom search engine we created.
we have to 'pull' reviews via search, then if we find a good one, we enter them manually into an airtable form we created which stores it into our airtable base (which is actually the production db for the site).
@mubashariqbal i will dm you. would love to talk more about the curation backend to what you built if you're game!
@hnshah@smalter@mubashariqbal Great work guys. I have a question on your stack. (heads' up – I love both Laravel and Wordpress). I'd love to know why you didn't choose Wordpress, did you consider it at all, or go straight to Laravel? Or re-use old code from another project? Wordpress via REST could have been a good happy-medium. I'm genuinely curious, because I've been making the Laravel vs. Wordpress call quite a bit lately.
@hnshah@smalter@joetannorella
I guess I made the decision here, I went with Laravel mostly for the backend system that I knew I wanted to build. The aggregation of content from a variety of different sources (Medium, Twititer, RSS) and more in the future that we don't about yet. I also wanted a very simple interface to review and publish or reject that content.
Could it have been done in Wordpress, yes! I've built similar things in Wordpress in the past too, but I feel like the aggregation and administration would have been more complicated.
Hiten has a special superpower when it comes to curating content. He always seems to find the best content about Product (and just about everything else). Typically we have to wait to see it until the weekly Product Habits newsletter or when @hnshah decides to share it on his Twitter account.
Now, the wait is over. If you're looking for Product content on a daily basis, go to Product News 😺
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