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.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.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.I use a flask app for the search functionality that accesses an elastic search database.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.