It's been almost a year since I started work on serializer.io, my newsreader side project. Before putting serializer together I'd had trouble finding a solution for reading news across multiple devices in a way that made sense. So far it's worked well, and apparently for some others too, for $5 in hosting a month serializer serves a linear newsfeed to around 75 visitor a day.
I've had to maintain serializer over the year. Product Hunt, a key source of items, has changed three times in a way that needed me to adjust the scraper. Other than that and the occasional stylistic change serializer has run without intervention and collected over 75,000 links in the process. I've even received some donations from by recently added PayPal Donate button.
Attached are a number of graphs I put together from the first year's data.
Items per day, shows the weekly item trend quite nicely
Item % by source
Of those that use the mark as read feature, how many times have they done so.
Trends for topics, no surprises really
Trends for mentioned companies, I'd have thought Twitter would have been higher.