How I Built a Privacy-First, Automated Tech News Aggregator in PHP (And Why I Ditched the Heavy Frameworks)

I was tired of tech news sites that track everything you click, load slowly, and hide half their content behind paywalls. So I built my own. The result is PulseTech.news — a lightning-fast, automated tech news aggregator that updates every hour, covers 16 categories, and is fully GDPR/CCPA compliant with zero creepy tracking. Here's exactly how I built it, the architectural decisions I made, and what I learned along the way. The Stack (And Why I Chose It) Before I get into the architecture, here's the full stack: PHP 8.x — custom lightweight framework, no Laravel, no Symfony MySQL 8.x — via PDO with prepared statements throughout Tailwind CSS — standalone binary, no Node build pipeline SimplePie — for RSS/Atom feed parsing Composer — for dependency management (vlucas/phpdotenv, simplepie) The biggest decision here was rejecting heavy frameworks . I didn't need the overhead of Laravel for what is essentially a read-heavy content site. A custom lightweight PHP framework gave me sub-100ms