Habesha News

An Ethiopian news aggregator. It pulls live RSS feeds from Ethiopian (and Ethiopia-focused) publishers, auto-sorts stories into categories, and links out to the original source for the full article.

Running it

npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

Optional API keys

The site works with no keys. Set these (in .env.local, or Vercel → Project → Settings → Environment Variables) to switch on extra sources:

• WORLD_NEWS_API_KEY — World News API free plan. Adds articles from Ethiopian publishers (source-country=et) and "Ethiopian diaspora" coverage. Refreshed every 2 hours to stay inside the free plan's 50 points/day; the footer backlink the plan requires appears automatically.
• OPENEXCHANGERATES_APP_ID — Open Exchange Rates free plan, used as the international baseline in the Business & Economy exchange-rate tracker (hourly updates, ~720 of the 1,000 monthly requests). Without it the tracker falls back to ExchangeRate-API's keyless daily rates.

The exchange-rate tracker's official rates (Commercial Bank of Ethiopia) and parallel-market rates (EthioBlackMarket) need no keys.

How it works

• src/lib/sources.ts — the list of RSS feeds. Add a publisher by adding an entry here (needs feedUrl, siteUrl, and language).
• src/lib/fetchNews.ts — fetches all feeds in parallel, normalizes items into Articles, and caches the result in memory for 15 minutes so page loads don't re-hit every feed. If a refetch fails, it falls back to the last good cache instead of erroring.
• src/lib/promoFilter.ts — drops items that aren't news (job adverts, vacancy and tender notices, press releases, sponsored and product-launch posts), matched on specific headline and snippet wording.
• src/lib/categorize.ts — keyword-based classifier that buckets each article into Politics, Business & Economy, Sports, Fashion & Lifestyle, Technology, Diaspora & World, or General.
• src/app/page.tsx and src/app/category/[slug]/page.tsx — the homepage (all articles) and per-category pages.

Current sources

Fana Media Corporation, Capital Ethiopia, Addis Fortune, Ethiopian Monitor, BBC Amharic, Shega, AllAfrica (Ethiopia), New Business Ethiopia, Ethiopia Insight, and Borkena (via its WordPress REST API, as its RSS feed is off). Addis Standard, The Reporter Ethiopia, Ezega News, VOA Amharic, and Zehabesha all publish feeds too, but block automated fetches (403s, Cloudflare challenge) — worth retrying later or swapping in a scraper if you want them included.

Sports: HatrikSport, Soccer Ethiopia, Athletics Africa (Ethiopia), Fana's sport section, and The Reporter's sport sections in English and Amharic (the English site's own feed works again as of 2026-10-26).

Known limitations / next steps

• Categorization is keyword-based on English text, so Amharic-language articles (BBC Amharic) mostly land in "General" — a real fix needs Amharic keyword lists or an AI classification pass.
• No persistence: the article cache is in-memory and resets on server restart. Fine for local dev; a deployed version would want a small DB or KV store instead.
• No search yet.
• Not deployed. When ready, it's a standard Next.js app — Vercel is the path of least resistance (vercel deploy), with feed refresh handled via Vercel Cron hitting a route that calls getArticles().