What is toplist?

TopList (also called Today's Hot List, or in Chinese: 今日热榜) is a website aggregator that collects trending headlines from several major Chinese online communities and displays them in one place. It pulls live data from platforms such as Zhihu (a Chinese Q&A site), Hupu, and others, giving users a single page to scan what is popular across multiple sites at once. The project is written in Go and splits its work between two programs. One program is a crawler that fetches fresh trending data from each source site. It runs on a scheduled task, typically once per hour, using the server's built-in job scheduler (cron). The other program is a web server that takes the stored data and serves it to visitors through a browser interface and a simple API. Data is stored in a MySQL database. To set up the project yourself, you compile both programs, create the database using a provided SQL file, edit a configuration file with your database credentials, and then update a JavaScript config file with your server address. After that you start the crawler on a schedule and keep the server running in the background. The README is written in Chinese and includes setup steps, a directory layout, and API documentation with example responses. The API returns JSON and allows callers to fetch a list of available source categories and then request the current hot items for any one category. The project is self-hosted, meaning you run it on your own server rather than relying on any external service.