Trendable

Trendable is a lightweight headline intelligence tool for ranking what is worth paying attention to across Dylan's news and signal sources.

It runs as both a local CLI and a Vercel-ready dashboard/API. The scraper collects headline candidates from configured source dashboards, JSON endpoints, and page metadata, then scores them for recency, source placement, keyword overlap, cross-source momentum, and available article context.

Highlights

• Pulls from multiple configured dashboards and news endpoints.
• Extracts headlines from HTML, metadata, and JSON payloads.
• Deduplicates near-matching stories before ranking.
• Enriches strong candidates with summaries and images when available.
• Ships as a zero-dependency Python script plus a Vercel serverless endpoint.
• Includes a static front end for quickly scanning the ranked list.

Stack

Layer	Technology
Scraper	Python standard library
Ranking	Keyword frequency, cross-source overlap, source-position weighting
API	Vercel Python serverless function
UI	Static HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Deploy	Vercel

How It Works

Configured sources
    -> HTML + JSON extraction
    -> headline cleanup
    -> scoring + deduplication
    -> metadata enrichment
    -> CLI output or `/api/trendable`

The ranking model intentionally stays transparent. Every result carries source, score inputs, summary, image URL when found, and a direct link when available.

Local CLI

python trendable.py

Optional arguments:

python trendable.py --limit 20 --timeout 12

API

GET /api/trendable?limit=15&timeout=10

Parameters:

Name	Default	Range	Purpose
limit	15	1-50	Number of ranked headlines to return
timeout	10	2-20	Seconds to wait per source

Example response shape:

{
  "triggerword": "Trendable",
  "count": 15,
  "sourceCount": 6,
  "durationSeconds": 3.42,
  "headlines": [
    {
      "text": "Example headline",
      "source": "https://example.com/",
      "url": "https://example.com/story",
      "tag": "json",
      "position": 1,
      "score": 42.5,
      "summary": "Short story summary",
      "image_url": "https://example.com/image.jpg"
    }
  ],
  "errors": []
}

Vercel Deploy

Deploy the repository to Vercel. The project exposes:

• / - static dashboard
• /api/trendable - Python serverless API endpoint

No Python package installation is required; the scraper uses the standard library.

Repository Map

Path	Purpose
trendable.py	Scraper, ranking logic, CLI
api/trendable.py	Vercel serverless API wrapper
public/index.html	Production dashboard
index.html	Local/static dashboard copy
TRENDABLE.md	Codex triggerword runbook
vercel.json	Vercel routing

Roadmap

• Add source health snapshots and latency telemetry.
• Add persisted trend history for "rising" vs. "already saturated" stories.
• Add screenshot examples to the README after a stable deployment pass.
• Add unit tests for JSON extraction, deduplication, and score weighting.

Design Principle

Trendable favors explainable ranking over opaque virality claims. It is built to help a human operator scan faster, spot overlap earlier, and turn raw headline flow into better editorial judgment.