Today, I would like to tell you about a new web app called Hexfield which allows people to curate the news. I have been searching for an easy way to gather the bits of local news that I see all of the time, and really there wasn’t anything that fit my needs. That’s why I decided to build something myself using Base44, and the apps I built worked well enough, but they didn’t have that special angle that made them unique. Then, last Saturday I got the idea of taking an entirely different approach. I re-imagined the news gathering apparatus not as CMS, but as a news gathering dashboard, like you might see with tracking software.
Because, in a lot of ways, what I had been looking for was a way to organize the news that’s shared on Facebook and other platforms, refine it, and then cite sources. In short, this would be news curation and sharing.

I described to Base44 what I wanted, and it put together a kind of news dashboard, and over the last few days I continued to improve upon it. At first glance, it is just a page which lists news articles which have been broken up into different columns which represent categories. You can read an article by clicking on its headline and read its sources.

But, Hexfield goes a little farther by letting readers post comments in the articles, and chat with other readers via a dashboard chat function. Readers can also submit their own articles for inclusion in the dashboard. The submissions are reviewed and then accepted before they appear in the dashboard. Readers can also share the dashboard via the web and export the articles either as a PDF or as a webpage for more casual reading or sharing.

There are still some areas I’m still working on, but for the most part the app functions like I want it to. My next goal is to find a handful of people who may have the same interest in news and might be helpful in either helping me to curate news for the site I’m building, called Mastodon, or may want to start a dashboard/publication of their own. Any published dashboard is ready to be shared with an audience and crowdsourced, and I’m willing to open up the admin controls to people who would like to help or serve as an editor for their own project. If you’re interested, send me a DM inside the platform you’re reading this on or send email to jon@gazerbeam.com.

Check out the web app here.