What is Newsense?
Newsense is a simple webpage that shows one good news story every day. Nothing more, nothing less. The idea came from a familiar frustration – news is relentless, heavy, and designed to keep you anxious and scrolling. Newsense is the opposite of that. You open it, read one genuinely uplifting story from somewhere in the world, and close it. That’s the whole experience.
Why Build This?
Most “good news” websites still look and feel like news websites – infinite feeds, trending sections, related articles, ads. They replicate the same attention-grabbing mechanics they’re trying to offer an alternative to.
Newsense takes a different position: one story, chosen for you, once a day. No feed. No algorithm visible to you. No way to scroll for more. The constraint is intentional. It respects your time and attention rather than competing for it.
How It Works
Every day at midnight (UTC), an automated job scans 30 hand-picked RSS feeds from positive and constructive news sources across the world – outlets covering science breakthroughs, environmental wins, community stories, social progress, and human achievement. Sources span regions including South Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
From all the articles published in the last 7 days across these sources, one is picked at random. The article’s headline and excerpt are then sent to Claude (an AI by Anthropic) which writes a warm, plain-language summary – as if a friend were quietly telling you about something good that happened somewhere. The story is then cached and served to every visitor for the rest of the day.
The next day, the process repeats with a fresh pick.
Why This Architecture?
The project is built on Vercel, a serverless hosting platform. This means there is no server running 24/7. Code only executes when needed – when a visitor loads the page, or when the daily job runs at midnight. This keeps costs at zero and infrastructure at a minimum.
Redis (via Upstash) acts as the daily cache. Once the story is picked and summarised for the day, it gets stored in Redis with a 48-hour expiry. Every visitor that day gets the same story served instantly from the cache – no repeated API calls, no repeated AI processing.
RSS feeds are the source layer. RSS is an open, reliable standard that most news websites support. It lets the project read headlines and excerpts from 30 sources without needing special access or API agreements with any of them.
Claude (Haiku model) handles the summarisation. Rather than showing a raw excerpt – which can be dry, incomplete, or clickbait-y – the summary is rewritten in a human, conversational tone. The prompt specifically instructs the model to write as if telling a friend, avoid hype, and keep it grounded.
The Design
The visual aesthetic is deliberately retro – modelled after the classic Macintosh desktop of the 1980s. Cream background, a monospace font (Courier Prime), a window titlebar with horizontal stripe decoration. The design signals slowness and intentionality. It feels like something that’s been around for a while and isn’t trying to impress you.
There are no images, no icons, no navigation. Just the date, the headline, the summary, a link to the original article, and the article’s published date.
Key Technical Choices
| Decision | Reason |
| Vercel serverless | Zero infrastructure to manage, free tier sufficient |
| Upstash Redis | Serverless-compatible, simple key-value cache |
| RSS over scraping | Reliable, standard, no legal grey area |
| Claude Haiku | Fast, affordable, good at tone-following instructions |
| 7-day article filter | Ensures stories are recent, avoids surfacing old content |
| One story per day | Core product constraint, not a technical limitation |
Repick
There is a hidden feature for the site owner – a repick URL. If the daily story is a video, a paywalled article, or just not a good fit, hitting a secret URL forces the system to pick a fresh story and replace the cached one. All visitors immediately see the new story. This exists as a lightweight editorial override without needing a full admin interface.
Stack Summary
- Hosting – Vercel (serverless, Node.js)
- Cache – Upstash Redis
- RSS Parsing – rss-parser (Node.js library)
- AI Summarisation – Anthropic Claude (Haiku model)
- Frontend – Plain HTML and CSS, no framework
- Source Code – GitHub
Launched on 3rd March 2026 – https://newsense.nanusense.com
