Digital news publication
The Coastal
An independent digital newspaper for the Eastern Cape coast, and the platform that runs it.
- My role
- Co-Founder and Technical Lead
- Platform
- Web
- Status
- Live
- Built with
- Next.js, TypeScript, Supabase, PostgreSQL, Prisma
The Coastal is an independent newsroom covering the towns, cities and shoreline of South Africa’s Eastern Cape. I am its Co-Founder and Technical Lead: the public website, the newsroom publishing system, the integrations, the hosting and the architecture are all mine to build and keep running.
A newspaper that reads like one, run by a system built for it
A news publication is two products: the site readers see and the tools the newsroom works in every day. I built both. The public site is designed to read like a newspaper, with strong photography and a clear line between news and opinion. Behind it sits a custom editorial system where stories are written, checked, scheduled and published.
- 01
Public website
Section pages, article pages, search, an RSS feed and a news sitemap, with a responsive layout that reads well on a phone.
- 02
Newsroom CMS
A private admin for stories, media, categories, places and municipalities, advertising, cartoons, reports, subscribers and supporters, with separate user access.
- 03
Human in charge of AI
AI can help read long council documents and draft, but it never publishes. The software is built so that an editor signs off every story.
- 04
Scheduled publishing
Stories can be queued to publish later; a scheduled job on Vercel publishes them on time.
- 05
Weather, surf and warnings
Live weather and surf pages, an interactive forecast map and severe-weather warnings, refreshed automatically on a schedule.
- 06
Advertising
Ad placements and their management live inside the CMS, alongside a rate card and ad specifications for advertisers.
- 07
Local sport and schools
Dedicated tooling for school and club sport coverage that a general-purpose CMS would not offer.
Engineering that can carry a newsroom
The Coastal runs on Next.js and TypeScript, with Supabase providing Postgres, authentication and file storage, and Prisma for database access. Staging and production are separate environments, database changes are versioned migrations, and hosting, cron jobs and deployments are on Vercel. It is a substantial platform that I design, build and maintain.
Built with
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Supabase
- PostgreSQL
- Prisma
- Tailwind CSS
- Vercel
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A site that needs to be better, an app that needs to exist, a platform that has outgrown its tools. Tell me what it is and I’ll tell you honestly how I’d approach it.
hi@rudilouw.com