Automated news collection and management for an events portal

The challenge

The Avui.info team, led by Roberta, was facing a major challenge: collect in one site all the events of interest to families that take place in Barcelonès Nord and Maresme, two regions in the province of Barcelona.

This meant manually consulting over 20 different websites, a job that took about 10 hours a week. This commitment made it difficult to keep the site up to date.

The solution

The solution proposed by Qabiria was the implementation of an automation system based on the Hexomatic platform. The project was structured in several phases:

1. Creation of custom scraping recipes
   For each of the 20 websites used as event sources, a scraping recipe was created that first extracts the list of events and then the key data of each event, such as title, date, time, location and description.

2. Centralizing data in Google Sheets
   The data extracted from the websites is automatically sent to a Google Sheet shared with the Avui.info team, which can then organize and filter events in seconds. Currently the sheet collects an average of 150 events per week, from which the most interesting ones for families are selected.

3. Plan for full publishing automation
   Currently, the Avui.info site is based on SquareSpace, which does not allow publishing via API. A move to a new CMS, such as WordPress, was then planned, which will allow Roberta and her team to publish events directly from Google Sheets with a simple click via webhook.

The result

Thanks to this automation:

• Time spent on event research and collection has decreased from 10 hours per week to less than 1 hour.
• Roberta can now review and select events directly in Google Sheets, where an average of 150 events per week are recorded from different sources.
• The site update frequency has increased, improving the user experience.
• Since implementation, site visits have increased by 25% and average user browsing time has increased by 15%, due to a more up-to-date and relevant event offering.

The collaboration between Avui.info and Qabiria is still active. Further technical improvements have already been proposed, such as a feature that allows users to directly suggest events and usability optimizations to encourage greater interaction with the community.