When you enjoy the way Paper Pile presents your favourite news, you may not notice the long way these news have been traveled. Let me explain, how everything works.

When you enter an URL, your request will be sent to this server. The server examines the URL trying to find out, what content you are looking for. In turn, it requests the URL your entered searching for any kind of RSS feeds. If you are not familiar with RSS feeds: it is like a little digital press release intended to be consumed by virtually everybody.

Most of the time, the system is able to determine the RSS feed. Now the real work begins. The server loads as many information as it can get. These information get processed:

1. Transforming all HTML-related words and characters to expressions you can read and understand.
2. Removing things Paper Pile cannot display e.g. links, sounds, movies.
3. Harmonizing different encodings and RSS standards.
4. Statistic analyses that prepare the presentation as a newsletter article.
5. Saving the article to reduce traffic, see here.

When all is done the articles get delivered to your device. Once they’ve arrived Paper Pile saves them on your device so you do not need to be connected to the Internet to read your newspaper anymore.

For the more curious: The backend is driven by PHP and it uses a modified SimplePie-RSS-Reader.