How to build a news app that never goes down and costs you practically nothing
This is an excellent post. I used almost exactly the same system to build my app streamjoy.tv . Everyday streamJoy scours Netflix, iTunes and Amazon to find the availability of movies for streaming, rental and digital purchase.<p>I built it as a portfolio piece and haven't finished it because I've been doing consulting jobs, but if you want to watch a particular movie online without going the pirate route, it's the start of a legal alternative to the old sites like sidereel.<p>The tech behind it is the same as this article. Flask and jinja render a static html page for each of about 92,000 movies.<p>I use a flask app for the search functionality that accesses an elastic search database.<p>I used mongodb because it was incredibly easy to create a local cache of the JSON data I was getting from the apis I was accessing.<p>It all took a lot longer than I ever would have though to even get it to this point. There were a lot of little annoying issues with the various APIs I had to access, and the annoyance of parsing XML amongst other schelps I had to deal with.<p>I have only ever mentioned it on hacker news one other time and the last time my elastic search server crashed from the traffic. It is all running on a $5 a month digital ocean vps.<p>The flask/jinja static page creation is rock solid and would never fail if I pushed it to s3, right now my elastic search server is the bottle neck. I haven't taken the time to throw hardware at it or set up clustering.<p>All in all it's a pretty cool service in my opinion, I built it for myself because I love movies and spend a lot of time watching them online and made a decision to never pirate a content creators work again. Also the experience of netflix, amazon and itunes is orders of magnitude better than the old megavideo/bittorrent trouble of finding the real deal and not being inflicted with spammy ads with voiceover.<p>I really like the flask/jinja/bootstrap/javascript/mongodb/elastic search stack. I've learned a lot of tips and tricks by building streamJoy and if people want I would be happy to share them with the community.<p>I know this sounds like self promotion of my app but I haven't even taken the time to implement affiliate tracking for any service besides amazon. Consulting is serious and real money right now and that takes priority over this little side project I did.