It was a late-September summer evening, a light breeze drifting through the window, rustling the treetops and carrying some indistinct smell from the neighbors' kitchen.
And then, out of nowhere, the idea hit me —
to launch a Telegram channel that would aggregate the most interesting news headlines in economics and technology, sourced from the world's leading outlets, with each headline automatically translated into Hebrew using AI.
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The tools I used for the process:
**RSS feeds** — for pulling headlines and links from source websites in XML format.
**N8N server** — an open-source automation platform I deployed on a self-hosted server.
**An AI model** — I started with Claude's Haiku 3.5, then switched to OpenAI's 4o mini. The idea behind the model choice was to achieve a solid level of translation quality while keeping token costs low.
The entire workflow runs inside N8N as the central data hub.
It fetches the content, sends it for translation, extracts the article link, and once everything is ready, publishes the message to the Telegram channel via a bot configured there as an admin.
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From idea to live channel took less than two hours.
What followed was refining the message structure and translation quality, further filtering of news sources, and finishing the Telegram channel setup.
The result is genuinely impressive and delivers high-quality content (the translation still leaves something to be desired — it is AI, after all), but the stream of ideas it has sparked only keeps growing stronger as time goes on.
This toolset can be used to build feeds of any kind — from news channels for general audiences or internal channels for media organizations, all the way to automated deal channels that publish discounted products from major e-commerce sites.
These feeds can generate revenue through ad sales, affiliate marketing, and embedding in third-party websites to boost SEO.
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The next planned step is setting up a self-hosted RSS management server.
Such a server could turn any legally scrapable information source into an RSS feed that can be processed, filtered, and merged with many other data sources to create a single, high-quality stream of updates.
The range of applications is nearly endless, and using the right combination of open-source platforms and the remarkable technological capabilities around us makes the whole process genuinely enjoyable.
*Pictured: the economics headlines channel on Telegram.
Above it you can see AI Pulse, a similar channel in the process of being set up that will focus on AI news, and below it Channel 10 — Israel's go-to source for anyone interested in money.*