The internet has so many resources on every subject it can be overwhelming. With that in mind, Kai Zhang created Market Cafe – Financial Market News & Analysis.
Market Cafe is a website dedicated to curating quality content in Chinese about the financial world. His goal: inform the local investors about the driving forces of the market without bombarding them with information.
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Kai Zhang, creator of Market Cafe
His tool: the Curated RSS Aggregator WordPress plugin, by CreativeMinds. With it, he was able to come up with lists organized in categories and tags, such as “Fund” and “Macroeconomics”. Users can quickly navigate between topics and use a live search for commodity.
“Many financial news sources I use have fragmented information. It is time consuming to browse through different sites to see what’s happening,” explains Kai.
The Challenge: Informing Readers Efficiently
Zhang says that efficiency was the core idea behind the project: “I was hoping to spend a few minutes of the users’ time to browse major economic and financial news.”
Since most of this precious time is wasted on filtering noise and low-quality articles, the idea of curating content by aggregating news soon came to mind.
The header of Market Cafe
The Plan: Topic-based Lists
The CM Curated RSS Aggregator in action in Market Cafe
Curating the content meant not only choosing the best available sources, but also organizing the articles in topics. This would ensure users would find what’s relevant to them.
Making use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) was a no-brainer, as many of the most important news sources provide rich RSS sources with their articles. This, in turn, would ensure the content was easy to maintain and up-to-date.
Zhang’s research indicated the project was possible with a WordPress plugin.
But the WordPress plugin would have to fetch RSS sources and list them organized by neat categories and tags.
Market Cafe displays RSS news lists using categories, tags and a live search filter
The Solution: CM Curated RSS Aggregator
After researching for alternatives in the WordPress community, Zhang settled with CM RSS Aggregator due to its extensive list of features: “CreativeMind’s keywords search, grouping and labelling feature really stand out in my opinion. They make content organized and easy to maintain”. “Speed is also pretty fast,” he says.
Other features include favicons, “new item” tag, styling options (font size, category background color, tooltip color and more) and user personalization.
“Now users can focus on interpreting the implications instead of being bombarded by news flow,” celebrates Zhang.
The plugin supports all UTF-8 languages, so no modification was necessary to ensure Chinese would work properly.
Finally, he compliments the good communication with the development team – he suggested a feature involving listing articles of certain tags only, which was implemented in the next update of the plugin.
This made him feel that the plugin was alive: “The manual task you are trying to spend hours on maybe is on its way to the next iteration.”
