User Guide

Overview

News Archive collects articles from RSS feeds and stores them in a searchable database. Articles are fetched automatically every hour. The public search page lets anyone browse and search the archive; the admin dashboard lets you manage which feeds are monitored.

Public Search Page

The search page is available at the root of the site.

Browsing without a search term

Leave the search box empty and click Search (or just load the page) to browse all articles in the archive, newest first. The total article count and page number are shown above the results.

Keyword search

Type one or more words into the search box and click Search. The search looks at article headlines and summaries.

Search tips:

Syntax	Effect	Example
Plain words	All words must appear	`city council budget`
`"phrase"`	Exact phrase match	`"school board meeting"`
`word*`	Prefix wildcard	`electi` matches election, elected*, etc.

Filters

All filters can be combined with each other and with a keyword search. Hit Search after changing any filter to apply it.

Filter	Description
Source	Limit results to a single news source
Country	Limit results to feeds tagged with a specific country
State	Limit results to feeds tagged with a specific state
City	Limit results to feeds tagged with a specific city
From	Only show articles published on or after this date
To	Only show articles published on or before this date

Location filters (Country, State, City) only appear when feeds have been tagged with location data.

Click Clear to remove all active filters and return to the full archive.

Results

Each result shows:

Headline — linked to the original article on the publisher's website
Source — the name of the news outlet, linked to its homepage
Date — publication date
Summary — a short excerpt from the article

Results are paginated at 20 per page. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate.

Exporting results

When results are shown, two export buttons appear above them:

Export HTML — downloads a complete HTML document with all matching articles (no pagination limit)
Export Text — downloads a plain text file with all matching articles separated by ---

Both exports include all active filters, so what you see is what you get in the download.

Admin Dashboard

The admin dashboard is at /admin/login. Log in with your admin username and password.

Overview

The dashboard shows:

Feeds tracked — total number of RSS feeds in the database
Items stored — total number of articles collected

Adding a single feed

In the Add a feed panel, paste the RSS feed URL into the input box
Click Add
The feed is validated before saving — if the URL is not a working RSS feed, an error message explains why
Duplicate URLs are handled silently (no error shown)

The new feed will be checked on the next hourly worker run.

Importing feeds from an OPML file

In the Import from OPML panel, click Choose File and select your .opml file
Click Import
The import processes each feed in the file, skips duplicates, and reports how many were imported, skipped, and errored

If your OPML file includes country, state, or city attributes on each feed entry, those location values are imported automatically.

Feed table

The feed table lists all monitored feeds with:

Feed name — linked to the publication's homepage
Items — number of articles collected from this feed
Last polled — when the worker last checked this feed
Location — country, state, and city tags (editable inline)
Remove button — deletes the feed and all its articles

Editing feed location

Click the location cell for any feed to edit it inline. You can set country, state, and city independently. Location data powers the location filter dropdowns on the public search page — they only appear once at least one feed has a location tag.

Removing a feed

Click Remove on any feed row. A confirmation dialog appears before anything is deleted. Removing a feed permanently deletes the feed and all articles collected from it.

Changing your password

Scroll to the Change password section at the bottom of the dashboard. Enter your current password and your new password twice, then click Change Password.

Logging out

Click Log out in the top-right corner of the dashboard.

Feed updates

The worker runs automatically every hour and checks every feed in the database for new articles. Duplicate articles are ignored — running the worker multiple times is safe.

If you need to fetch new articles immediately (e.g. after adding a batch of feeds), ask your server administrator to run the worker manually.