Meridian, a news platform
A full news site in the browser: front page, live blog, video, podcasts, personalised feed and a real search engine. All stories are fictional.
Overview
Meridian is a product study in what a modern news site needs. It has a lead story with top stories, a live bar, section pages with a mega menu, a video page with a custom player, podcasts with a persistent audio bar, author and topic pages, a For you feed built from followed topics, reader polls, reactions and comments. Search has autocomplete, filters, did-you-mean and recent searches. Every story, person, score and price is invented sample content and is labelled as a demo edition. Runs entirely in the browser with sample data and no server. It is an original BURGTECH product demo, not software in use by any client.
The problem
News sites are among the most feature-dense interfaces on the web. This project asks whether all of those features can work together coherently without a backend.
The solution
A single-page app with hash routing, a 40-article sample archive and a ranking and search library written and unit-tested separately from the interface.
Key functionality
- Lead story, top stories rail and live bar
- Live blog with key events and automatic updates
- Video page with a custom canvas player, captions, speed and fullscreen
- Podcasts with a persistent audio bar (browser speech synthesis)
- Search with autocomplete, filters, did-you-mean and recent searches
- For you feed from followed topics
- Section pages with a mega menu, author pages and topic pages
- Reader polls, reactions and comments
- Breaking-news banner, dark mode, infinite feed
Architecture
Static single-page app. Data, search and ranking logic are plain ES modules covered by Node tests. Illustrations are generated as SVG in the browser. State is kept in localStorage.
Contribution
Designed, built and tested by Burgess Awalayah Glay.
Screens
