News Terminal — Portfolio Write-up

What is it?

The News Terminal is a real-time geopolitical intelligence dashboard I built and self-hosted at news.taciturn.uk. It was designed to give me a single place to monitor the news events most relevant to my algorithmic trading system, Taciturn specifically anything affecting oil prices, gold, silver, and global market sentiment.

How it works

The backend is a Python Flask app that pulls from a curated set of RSS feeds every five minutes, including Al Jazeera, Reuters, BBC World, BBC Politics, OilPrice.com, and The Guardian US. Every article is automatically scanned for keywords and tagged — OIL, GOLD, SILVER, GEOPOLITICAL, TRUMP — so the most relevant stories surface immediately. Urgent articles trigger a push notification to my phone via Pushover.

At the centre of the dashboard is an interactive world map built with Leaflet.js, showing live hotspots for the key geopolitical flashpoints: the Strait of Hormuz, Taiwan, Iran, China, Ukraine, and Saudi Arabia. Each marker pulses with a colour-coded threat level and shows a brief intelligence summary on hover.

Why I built it

Most news sites are noisy. I needed to know quickly whether something happening in the Middle East was about to move gold or oil, or whether a Trump executive order was relevant to commodity markets. Rather than tab between sources, I built one terminal that aggregates everything, filters it by topic and time window, and presents it in the same design language as my trading dashboard.

Tech stack

The app runs locally on my MacBook Air M2 and is served publicly via a Cloudflare Tunnel — no port forwarding, no server required. A macOS LaunchAgent ensures it starts automatically whenever my laptop is on. The frontend is pure HTML/CSS/JS — no frameworks — using JetBrains Mono and Bebas Neue to match the Taciturn aesthetic.

link to mini project https://news.taciturn.uk/