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Code Hippies
News & Publishing2026

ReadyNews

Lean custom-built news portal — no CMS bloat, versioned assets, full news schema.

The engineering

A purpose-built PHP news portal (single /assets/js/app.js bundle with a cache-busting version query, no CMS footprint in the markup) behind Cloudflare, carrying a complete news structured-data graph — NewsMediaOrganization, CollectionPage, ItemList, BreadcrumbList, ImageObject, SearchAction — with GA4 and AdSense wired in.

In plain language

A news site that loads fast on a cheap phone because there is no plugin stack sitting between the reader and the story.

The problem

What needed solving

Off-the-shelf news themes ship dozens of plugins a publisher never uses, and every one of them is weight on the reader's connection and surface area for an attacker.

The approach

How it was built

  • Build the publishing surface directly instead of adopting a theme, so the shipped JavaScript is one reviewed bundle.

  • Version every asset URL so a deploy invalidates cache deterministically instead of relying on a purge.

  • Serve behind Cloudflare so static assets and cacheable pages never touch the origin.

  • Emit BreadcrumbList and ItemList alongside NewsMediaOrganization so section hierarchy is explicit to crawlers.

The outcome

What it produced

  • One reviewed JavaScript bundle instead of a plugin dependency tree.
  • Deterministic cache invalidation on every release.

Related work

Other builds with the same shape

This project sits under Web development. Here are the closest neighbours in the portfolio.

  • News & Publishing2026

    IndiaNews16

    EngineeringSame custom PHP news engine as ReadyNews, deployed behind Cloudflare with dated build tags on its assets (app.js?v=20260705atlas1), serving a dense homepage — 90 internal links and 28 images in the initial HTML — under a NewsMediaOrganization / CollectionPage / BreadcrumbList / ItemList structured-data graph.

    In plain termsPuts a large amount of the day's news one click from the front page, without making the front page slow.

    • PHP
    • Custom CMS
    • Cloudflare
    • JSON-LD / Schema.org
  • News & Publishing2026

    CarbonMedia

    EngineeringRuns on PHP 8.2.30 (declared in x-powered-by) — a maintained, current runtime rather than a legacy 7.x install — serving a custom news application with three reader-facing forms, GA4 property G-BVNH0Z14GM and AdSense inventory, with WebSite + SearchAction JSON-LD.

    In plain termsCovers news, business, tech, sport and politics under one brand, and lets readers search and subscribe without leaving the page.

    • PHP 8.2
    • Custom CMS
    • GA4
    • Google AdSense
  • News & Publishing2025

    NewsLive24

    EngineeringWordPress origin behind nginx, instrumented with GA4 via Google Tag Manager and monetised with Google AdSense; the document carries the richest structured-data graph of the portfolio — NewsArticle, NewsMediaOrganization, CollectionPage, ItemList, ContactPoint and SearchAction — plus hreflang alternates.

    In plain termsRuns a full English news desk on a CMS the editors already know, while the technical SEO and ad plumbing is handled underneath them.

    • WordPress
    • nginx
    • GA4 / Tag Manager
    • Google AdSense

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