[NEWS] bitcoinmonkey.org - Trending Crypto News Aggregator 🐒🤖📰

[bitcoinmonkey_org]

Hi all, I just put online:

https://www.bitcoinmonkey.org/

It's a trending crypto news aggregator.

I initially created it just for myself, to find interesting stuff to read, and with Bitcoin Monkey I gave it a decent looking web interface.

It collects news from all major crypto news outlets, categorize them, assign a score, and calculate some stats, in order to surface the best trending news of the moment.

Any feedback, suggestion, or critique will be appreciated!  

It's still in its early days, so it's a bit rough on the edges, and I am still adjusting the algorithm that calculates the score for each news and categorize them.

PS: you won't be tracked by Google Analytics I self-host a basic privacy-respecting analytics platform to get just a few info about website usage.

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[bitcoinmonkey_org]

After a bit of a hiatus, I am back.
I recently did a major update in both the website UI/UX and in the way scores are calculated and I have a few major updates coming in the next few weeks to make the site a bit more useful and interesting.

Stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you have any feedback, feel free to chime in 

What  do you think of the website?
What would you like to see or what do you feel it's missing?

Cheers,
Stefano, bitcoinmonkey.org

[Bitcoin_Arena]

Nice one.
I appreciate the fact that the site is clean with no annoying ads that we usually find in such site. I don't know how long it will be like this, but I pray it stays that way long enough 

I have one suggestion. Could you please add a toggle between light and dark mode?

[bitcoinmonkey_org]

Thanks

Dark theme is in the pipeline, I should be able to push it live before the end of the year along with better archive pages for news about a specific crypto or topic (which for now are just a list of all news).

Of course I will want to find a way of monetizing the site, but I want to build a solid userbase first.
Anyway I am not planning of plastering the site with ad banners (especially not Google AdSense or the likes).

IF I reach the point where I will be able to monetize the site, the aim is to sell ad spaces directly to relevant companies only, and just have 1 or 2 (unobtrusive) spots in the page.
Another mid-to-long term plan is to create a daily or weekly curated newsletter.

[Yamane_Keto]

The UI is very attractive, the design is impressive, but the site is a little crowded and there is no way to rearrange or divide the screen or search for a specific topic or use a specialized keyword. If you make the split screen dynamic so that the user can delete or modify parts and improve the algorithm for displaying hot events, you will get great traffic.

[bitcoinmonkey_org]

Thanks for the advice Yamane_Keto!

What do you exactly mean with "split screen dynamic"? Do you have any example?

As for rearranging and search for specific topic/keywords, that's something I was thinking about too. A way to set your preferred crypto and topics to have a customized homepage to your liking.
And maybe even compose a "watchlist" of specific crypto to see in the sidebar.

But that would require a considerable dev effort, so it's something that might be done in the mid-long term. Maybe in the 2nd or 3rd quarter of 2024. Unfortunately I have only limited time to dedicate to this project for now, but your feedback is really appreciated!

[Yamane_Keto]

What do you exactly mean with "split screen dynamic"? Do you have any example?

Separate pages within a single webpage where with in main page, small pages can be reduced, enlarged, deleted, added, etc.

You can find the idea here, not necessarily the same interface. https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/btc-usd

Unfortunately I have only limited time to dedicate to this project for now, but your feedback is really appreciated!

You have already done an amazing job, the quality of the news display algorithm is the key to success.

[bitcoinmonkey_org]

Thanks again for the additional explanation. That's definitely a complex scenario to develop, but I will keep it in mind.
Maybe I can come up with a simplified version of it

[ABCbits]

I checked it for a bit and overall i had pleasant experience. Here's my short thought and feedback,
1. There's no top/cover image for each news which usually useless since it's just stock image.
2. It's nice to see a line contain when the news posted along with it's source and the author.
3. Dark/black theme would be great addition.
4. While it's nice you list all source website you use, in my opinion it's questionable to add cointelegraph[dot]com & coinidol[dot]com due to their questionable news quality. In addition, coinidol[dot] used to spam aggressively in this forum.

[bitcoinmonkey_org]

Thanks for the feedback ETFbitcoin!

1. There's no top/cover image for each news which usually useless since it's just stock image.

Yeah, I decided to not display those because they don't add any value and consume bandwidth for nothing, slowing down the website.
Considering also the fact that news comes in from a lot of different websites, it would just be a "soup" of different styles, stock images, illustrations, low quality mockups, and so on.

2. It's nice to see a line contain when the news posted along with it's source and the author.

As soon as I fix a few things with Reddit API calls, they will also have a list of the top Reddit threads talking about the news (and also HackerNews threads, plus some others to come).
I also want to make the "archive" page for each source and author a bit more interesting, with also more info and stats about them.

3. Dark/black theme would be great addition.

Stay tuned, it will come relatively soon (hopefully before the end of year).

4. While it's nice you list all source website you use, in my opinion it's questionable to add cointelegraph[dot]com & coinidol[dot]com due to their questionable news quality. In addition, coinidol[dot] used to spam aggressively in this forum.

I agree that coinidol appears to be low quality. There are a few news sources I am planning to remove.
What surprises me in your comment is cointelegraph. I always considered it to be a decent source of crypto news... but I might be wrong.

I am also planning to add more sources: generic news outlet (such as Financial Times et similia), blogs and YouTube channels. But, especially with the last two, I need to be really careful and do an in-depth review of the content they publish.

[ABCbits]

4. While it's nice you list all source website you use, in my opinion it's questionable to add cointelegraph[dot]com & coinidol[dot]com due to their questionable news quality. In addition, coinidol[dot] used to spam aggressively in this forum.

I agree that coinidol appears to be low quality. There are a few news sources I am planning to remove.
What surprises me in your comment is cointelegraph. I always considered it to be a decent source of crypto news... but I might be wrong.

It's mostly my opinion, but here are few reason why i think cointelegraph is questionable.
1. They have habit of turning a tweet from somewhat recognizable people into a news/article.
2. Somewhat inaccurate information. Few example from different bitcointalk thread,
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5467974.msg62899383#msg62899383
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5450411.msg62159050#msg62159050
3. Clickbait title.

[Potato Chips]

Ayyy nice to see another news aggregator.

Does the newsfeed --all recent news-- update in real time? meaning I don't have to refresh in order to get new entries?

Also appreciate that I can create a permalink for the filters I've used hence I can just bookmark the link to get the same setup in one click.

But I'm curious how these sources are sorted as it does seem random to me.



Perhaps we can do either alphabetically sorted or top choices first then the rest is alphabetically arranged as a QoL improvement. I would also be interested if there's an optional compact theme or something -- smaller font for news entries, smaller sidebars.

[bitcoinmonkey_org]

It's mostly my opinion, but here are few reason why i think cointelegraph is questionable.
1. They have habit of turning a tweet from somewhat recognizable people into a news/article.
2. Somewhat inaccurate information. Few example from different bitcointalk thread,
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5467974.msg62899383#msg62899383
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5450411.msg62159050#msg62159050
3. Clickbait title.

Got it! Thanks again ETFbitcoin!
I might not remove cointelegraph, but since there is also a bit of human curation under the hood, I will definitely keep in mind what you said!

Ayyy nice to see another news aggregator.

Does the newsfeed --all recent news-- update in real time? meaning I don't have to refresh in order to get new entries?

Potato Chips
No, it is currently static so you need to hit refresh.
But that's a nice suggestion! It should not be too difficult to implement an AJAX call that adds new articles every minute or so, without the need to refresh the page.
I'll add it to the backlog.

Also appreciate that I can create a permalink for the filters I've used hence I can just bookmark the link to get the same setup in one click.

But I'm curious how these sources are sorted as it does seem random to me.

Perhaps we can do either alphabetically sorted or top choices first then the rest is alphabetically arranged as a QoL improvement. I would also be interested if there's an optional compact theme or something -- smaller font for news entries, smaller sidebars.

Ah, you're right! They are currently sorted by "sources with the most articles published in the last 30 days", but I guess that alphabetical order makes more sense in this case.

As for the compact theme, not planning to have one yet. I want to focus first on a dark theme.
A more compact version might come in 2024 then

[bitcoinmonkey_org]

FYI: I fixed an issue with the Reddit APIs which made the order of top news a bit wacky...
Now it's all back to normal, and you should also be able to see links to top Reddit threads about each news (if there are any).

Over the next few weeks I'd like to integrate also LinkedIn and Facebook APIs, have a better idea of the popularity of each news and sort them accordingly.
If one day this site will earn some money I might even add Twitter APIs, but they are just too expensive at this point 

[SFR10]

What  do you think of the website?

It's easy on the eyes ^[bookmarked]

What would you like to see or what do you feel it's missing?

• It'd be nice to have something that can automatically filter out repetitive/similar articles ^{[e.g. here's one]}.
• A report button would come in handy if your aggregator fetches articles from a compromised source.

[bitcoinmonkey_org]

It's easy on the eyes ^[bookmarked]

Thank you SFR10, glad to read that!

• It'd be nice to have something that can automatically filter out repetitive/similar articles ^{[e.g. here's one]}.
• A report button would come in handy if your aggregator fetches articles from a compromised source.

I've added a report icon-link on all news and on the "News sources" page

As for filtering out repetitive and similar articles, that might be more complex.
Right now I can't think of an easy automated way of detecting the "similarity" of two articles.
But I'll add the idea to the backlog, it could be an interesting feature.

[robelneo]

Why not a magazine theme for your site, creating a news aggregator is now the trend and one of the easiest to launch as there's not much to do in writing an article but a news aggregator is like promoting other news sites.

To get more followers you should create a social media account and link it to your news aggregator sites so that every time you post a new link you can post in your social media accounts to announce it to your followers and read the headline first in your site before redirecting to the article site.
 

[bitcoinmonkey_org]

Why not a magazine theme for your site, creating a news aggregator is now the trend and one of the easiest to launch as there's not much to do in writing an article but a news aggregator is like promoting other news sites.

To get more followers you should create a social media account and link it to your news aggregator sites so that every time you post a new link you can post in your social media accounts to announce it to your followers and read the headline first in your site before redirecting to the article site.
 

The initial idea was a tool jus for myself, to find interesting things to read.
I am not a great writer, so a "magazine-like" website won't work with me.

More social presente is planned and it will come in the next few months.

---

In the meantime, all pages for each cryptocurrency now show a bit more info and stats to get a better overview of what's going on (at least it helps me reduce the number of browser's tabs I have open).

For example: https://www.bitcoinmonkey.org/crypto/btc/

[Potato Chips]

So I encountered a small error while I was using the website and thought I'd let you know

While I was on https://www.bitcoinmonkey.org/all-topics/, I noticed any "See all [category] news" button redirects to the same page.

A snapshot if I try to hover the mouse cursor on questioned item:

[bitcoinmonkey_org]

@Potato Chips, thanks for reporting this. I fixed it!