How Read What Matters sends your daily digest

The goal

Every morning, Read What Matters sends you one clean email with the best content from Hacker News and Reddit — no ads, no algorithm, no doom-scrolling. Here's exactly how that happens under the hood.

Step 1 — Fetching real content

We use two free, public APIs to get real-time content:

• Hacker News — via the official Firebase REST API at hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json. We fetch the top story IDs, then load each story's details in parallel.
• Reddit — via Reddit's public JSON endpoint: reddit.com/r/technology/top.json?t=day. No API key required.

// Hacker News top 5
const ids = await fetch("https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json");
const stories = await Promise.all(ids.slice(0,5).map(id =>
  fetch("https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/" + id + ".json").then(r => r.json())
));

// Reddit top 5 from r/technology
const posts = await fetch(
  "https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/top.json?limit=5&t=day",
  { headers: { "User-Agent": "ReadWhatMatters/1.0" } }
).then(r => r.json());

Step 2 — Building the email HTML

Once we have the stories, we build a styled HTML email using plain inline CSS (required for Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail compatibility). The email has a green header, an HN section, a Reddit section, and an unsubscribe footer.

Step 3 — Sending with Resend

const { data, error } = await resend.emails.send({
  from: "Read What Matters <digest@readwhatmatters.com>",
  to: user.email,
  subject: "Your daily digest — " + date,
  html: buildEmailHtml({ hnStories, redditPosts, date }),
});

Resend handles delivery, bounce tracking, and unsubscribe headers. Emails typically arrive within 2–5 seconds. The entire API route lives in app/api/send-digest/route.js and fetches all content in parallel before composing the final email.