Rewiring Times Wire
Back in 2009, I submitted a project to The New York Times’s internal Tech Challenge: a demo called Times Now, later renamed to Times Wire.
The idea was simple: a clear, reverse-chronological stream of every story published to the homepage. It was a kind of pulse of the newsroom, stripped of packaging and hierarchy. Not long after, it quietly launched to the public. Here’s the original post introducing it.
After I left, Times Wire evolved. The design was overhauled and brought in line with the updates to the larger site aesthetic, the codebase refactored, and the user experience became more structured. Some of those changes were improvements. Others made me miss the stark simplicity of the original. And at some point, pagination became less reliable. The stream no longer felt as complete.
This new version is a personal project, not affiliated with the Times. But it takes inspiration from both the original and its later version. I wanted to bring back that minimalist, feed-like feel while adding features I never got around to the first time. You can filter stories by section or by various terms. These include the most-mentioned people, organizations, and places from the past 24 hours. Filters are color-coded, expand automatically, and update as new stories appear.
It’s also fast. The page is fully static, with no frameworks or dependencies. Everything runs client-side, and performance has been a focus from the start. Its about 300 kb in total for the the whole page with an initial day worth of full content.
PageSpeed scores using Google Lighthouse consistently hit the high 90s, often hitting 100 across categories like Performance, Accessibility, and Best Practices.
Right now, it’s just something I made for myself. But I hope it’s useful or interesting for others too. It pulls from public RSS feeds and tries to do one thing well. I may expand it over time, at least fix any bugs I spot.
For now, it’s a chance to revisit an old idea and reimagine what it could look like today.