Building a Personalized News Feed on ISR and a Redis Ranking Layer
Client: Personal Project · Industry: Media / Publishing · Role: Full-Stack Developer & Architect · Duration: Personal project
The Challenge
Wanted to explore how far Next.js's Incremental Static Regeneration could go for a content site with a fast-moving, personalized homepage — the two are normally in tension, since ISR favors mostly-static pages while personalization favors per-request rendering.
The Solution
Split the architecture in two: article pages use ISR with a short revalidation window (fresh enough for news, cheap enough to serve at scale), while homepage feed ranking runs through a Redis sorted set scored by recency and per-user engagement signals, computed by a background worker rather than at request time. This kept the expensive personalization logic entirely off the request path — the API just reads a pre-computed sorted set.
Results & Impact
- Article pages serve from cache with sub-second loads while staying within minutes of "live"
- Personalized homepage feed renders from a pre-computed Redis ranking with no per-request scoring cost
- Used as a reference implementation for combining ISR with request-time personalization