About
Why?
I have always had trouble finding news that is independent and progressive. Malaysia's socialist, labour, indigenous and environmental-justice publishers exist, but they are scattered across small sites and social accounts that no search engine or feed reader shows together. This site puts their headlines in one place and sends readers on to them.
The other reason is variety. Where else can you see the latest from both PSM and Amnesty International Malaysia in the same place?
And relying on social media is distracting. One minute you are reading about forced evictions, the next you are watching cat videos. Not that cat videos are bad; there is a time and a place for everything. Here there is nothing else on the page.
Founded by Kris Khaira, just another Malaysian.
Principles
- This site shall encourage readers to visit the news sources, without duplicating entire content.
- The news sources must have a say in how this site is run.
- This site must not make a profit without the news sources benefiting in some way.
The rule
rumah panjang stores at most 280 characters of anyone's writing. The longest excerpt on the site right now is 280. The cap is checked against every item before any file is written, and the build fails if anything exceeds it.
Reading time, where shown, is measured from the full article and the article text is then discarded. It never reaches the published files.
An excerpt that has been cut ends on an ellipsis, and the lead story labels the cut.
What it costs the publishers
Nothing measurable. Every fetch is conditional, so a rebuild that finds no new posts transfers no article data at all. Images are pulled once, resized, and served from here — a reader loading the front page does not touch a publisher's server until they click.
An aggregator that keeps readers on the aggregator takes traffic from the people doing the reporting. This one is built to send it the other way.
Every headline, image and “read at” is a link off this site.
What it costs you
No cookie, no account, no tracker, no third-party request of any kind. The fonts are self-hosted. There is no analytics script, so nobody — including whoever runs this — can see what you read.
It is static HTML. It will keep working on a bad connection, an old phone, and a browser with scripts turned off, in which case you lose the filters and keep everything else.
The numbers
433 stories held, back to 5 Aug 2011. By language: 286 in English, 122 in Malay, 25 in Tamil.
Of 45 sources followed, 18 return items: 11 still publishing, 7 whose feed answers but who have gone quiet. The remaining 27 are on a platform with no readable route at all.
Every number on this page is computed from the stored data at build time rather than written by hand.