Developer Builds Public News API for Bilingual Tech Site Before Finding Users

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A developer launched a minimal public API for NewTqnia, a bilingual English-Arabic technology publication, to serve content across six delivery surfaces including a website, RSS feed, embeddable widget, and browser new-tab page. The first version of the Daily Digest API was intentionally kept small, offering only basic endpoints with no API key required and a rate limit of 60 requests per minute. The developer also built an embeddable JavaScript widget, acknowledging tradeoffs between iframe, Shadow DOM, and plain script approaches for style isolation. Structured timeline content — covering topics like the history of generative AI — introduced additional editorial challenges around conflicting sources, incomplete data, and choosing between custom JSON and interoperable formats like JSON-LD. Supporting Arabic added further complexity, requiring RTL layout, localized typography, and bilingual content fields that could not simply mirror the English-language structure.

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