How we get this data

For anyone who looks at this page and wonders: where does all this come from, and who decides what shows?

The short version

Blue Frog News is a reading page, not a newsroom. Nobody here writes stories. A small program on our server checks 224 public news feeds every hour, keeps the stories that pass a set of plain rules, sorts them onto tabs, and links every headline straight to the publisher. Once a day it rebuilds a calendar of 1084 Capital Region events from the venues' own calendars. The weather, the sunrise and the moon come from public weather data and a little arithmetic. There are no ads, no trackers and nothing to buy. One person, Jim Boykin, built it and keeps it running.

Where the news comes from

Every outlet on the site publishes a feed of its own headlines (an RSS feed), the same feed a news app would read. We read those feeds and nothing else. For 518 News we also run a handful of Google News searches for Capital Region towns, because some local outlets do not offer a feed. Sources are center or left leaning and free to read; the Times Union and The Daily Gazette are the two exceptions, kept because they matter locally, and marked paywall so you know before you click.

Each tab has its own page listing every source and every rule: World, USA, 518 News, 518 Events, 518 Sports, Business, Climate, Good News, Health, History, Music, Science and Space, SEO/AI, Sports, Tech and AI. The full list is on About and sources.

How a story gets on a tab

• Hard news on World and USA. Opinion columns, reviews, recipes, quizzes, celebrity and lifestyle pieces are left out, going by the publisher's own section labels and the headline.
• No crime blotter. No murders, arrests, charges or sentencings on any tab, no sexual crimes, no sports and no obituaries. 518 News has a longer list that also drops shootings, stabbings, police chases and overdoses. War and politics still show; a crime story does not.
• 518 News has to be local. A story needs a Capital Region place, institution or person in it (a town from Albany to Glens Falls, a county, a college, a hospital, an arena, a representative) unless it comes from an outlet that is itself local. Stories about Syracuse, New Paltz or El Paso that drift into local feeds are dropped.
• The right tab. A story that is really about the USA moves to USA even if a British paper wrote it, and a story about the world moves to World even if it came from an American feed.
• Once, not five times. When several outlets cover the same story it shows once, with the others under "Also". A story on World does not show again on USA or Health.
• Nobody hogs the page. Newest first, with a lift for stories many outlets cover, and no outlet may take more than 4 spots in a row (7 on 518 News, 2 for magazines and one-person newsletters). Stories about Donald Trump are held to about 1 in 10 unless you say otherwise.
• Fresh. The news feeds are checked every hour, on the hour, and the events calendar is rebuilt once a day at 5 am. World and USA stories drop off after 24 hours, 518 News after 36, the extra tabs after 48. Yesterday's page is always in Past days.
• A human can step in. The admin can remove a story or add one by hand; a hand-added story sits at the top of its tab for 48 hours and then leaves like any other.

How the events calendar is built

Once a day at 5 am the calendar is rebuilt from the venues' own calendars (Caffè Lena, Proctors, The Egg, MVP Arena, Putnam Place, the Park Theater and dozens more), the tourism calendars (Discover Saratoga, Discover Schenectady, Visit Lake George, Albany.com, GlensFalls.com), Ticketmaster and the Spectrum News 1 community calendar. Food and drink specials, trivia nights, government meetings and ticket add-ons are left out. The same event from two calendars shows once. Known venues get their right town and map point whatever a listing said. Times and dates can still change, so check the event's own page before you go.

Weather, sun, moon and the rest

Forecasts and air quality come from Open-Meteo, refreshed every hour, and alerts from the National Weather Service in Albany. Sunrise, sunset and the moon are worked out for Albany on our server. The quote of the day comes from ZenQuotes. The comics are shown straight from GoComics inside a window on this site, never copied. The horoscope is written for this site to be gentle and encouraging, and follows the real phase of the moon.

What you can change

Quite a lot, all in Settings, and all saved in your own browser (or with an optional account):

• Add tabs: Good News, Tech and AI, Science and Space, History, Health, Climate, Business, Music, SEO/AI, 518 Sports, Sports, Comics, Horoscope.
• How many stories per tab (30, 50 or up to 100), how many Trump stories (fewer, all or none), whether the two paywalled papers show, pictures on or off, and words that hide a story (up to 20).
• Your part of the region, so the front page and 518 Events start with Albany, Schenectady, Troy, Saratoga or Glens Falls.
• How it looks: light or dark, text size, and compact mode (headlines only, twice as many on a screen).
• The front page itself: which boxes show, in what order, and how many stories each one holds.
• 🔖 Read later under any story keeps it on your own page until you delete it. 👍 on any event keeps it in a list at the top of 518 Events.
• An account is optional. It asks for a name and a password, nothing else, and all it does is carry your settings, your Read later list and your thumbs up to your other devices.

Not from the 518?

The 518 is the area code for New York's Capital Region, and 518 News and 518 Events are built for the people who live here. If you are somewhere else, flip the I am not in the 518 switch at the top of Settings and those two tabs and the weather box step aside, leaving World, USA and whichever extra tabs you like.

Into SEO or AI?

Jim spent 26 years in search marketing, so the SEO/AI tab is picked with some care: Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable, the Google Search blog, Moz, Ahrefs and a long list of individual practitioners on the search side, and the people worth reading on AI on the other, with the ad-like posts filtered out. If that is your trade, bookmark bluefrognews.com/seo or add it to your tabs.

Your bands, playing near you

If you have an account, you can upload the listening history Spotify gives you (Account, Privacy settings, Download your data) on your account page. We keep only the artist names and how much you played them, nothing else, and from then on 518 Events shows a box of upcoming shows by artists you actually listen to, marks them with a note in the calendar, and can email you when a new one appears, daily or weekly, your choice.

What we do not do

We do not write, rewrite or summarize stories with software; the line under a headline is the publisher's own. We do not copy articles or pictures to our server; pictures are shown from the publisher and only while the story is on the page. We do not run ads, sell anything, or track you around the web. Settings live in a cookie in your browser; an account stores a name, a scrambled password and your settings, nothing more.

See something wrong?

A story on the wrong tab, an event at the wrong place, a source that should not be here, or one that should: tell Jim. Mistakes get fixed in the rules, so they do not come back.

Feeds for feed readers: /rss (World, USA and 518 News together), or one tab at a time such as /rss/world and /rss/local.