wired up the core tracking flow end-to-end: the database layer now initializes cleanly and stores everything it needs for topics, captured signals, and custom sources, with safeguards like foreign keys, URL dedupe, and soft-deactivation of topics so history is preserved

on top of that, i built the scraper to pull rss items (defaulting to google news or custom feeds), parse headlines safely, skip broken feeds without killing the run, filter by keyword when needed, and deduplicate links both within a scrape batch and against previously seen urls. overall, the foundation is now in place for user-specific topic tracking with reliable ingest and persistence.