Hacker News Reader

Comment by robocaptain | Hacker News Reader

I've been paying for newsblur (http://www.newsblur.com/) ever since google reader bit the dust. It's pretty much a direct replacement. Interface has come a long way since day one and is sufficiently slick now (UI, keyboard shortcuts, etc) that I don't really notice it.

Highly recommended by a (former) hardcore google reader user. If I recall correctly, got quite a good bit of press here on HN at the time.

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Thank you for posting about NewsBlur. I'd like to remind everybody that one of its most important features is that it is entirely open source

http://github.com/samuelclay

This means that if I were to ever invoke the bus factor you would still be able to use the same reader you use today. It negates the Google Reader problem and gives you confidence that I'm not selling your data or doing anything nefarious.

Plus it means you can contribute your own pet feature. About sixty people have done that so far, for web, iOS, and android. Open sourcing has paid off in spades and I'm planning to do the same for my next secret project, of which I'm in China for right now.

> my next secret project

> I am also working on a new hardware device called the Turn Touch Mac Remote. It controls custom built apps on your Mac.

lol. good luck!

I like to leave little hints for those who try. But you also don't know what it looks like yet. That's going to be quite the reveal.

I had no idea newsblur is open source! I can't believe you don't mention it at all on the newsblur.com landing page!

I've been getting fed up with feedly missing critical features. Knowing that newsblur is a service that I could potentially improve is enough to go through the pain of migrating my feeds to do a solid evaluation.

I'm a newsblur user but it is in no way a placement for reader. For one newsblur will only track the last 30 days of posts (or is it 30 news posts).

So for example in reader I might add site like Unity's blog. Reader would show the entire history as unread. I could then slowly go through all the old tutorials since they're all there. Newsblur I can't do that. It won't pull in stuff past a certain date/count.

That also means I can't just put some feeds on "low burn" mode where I keep them but only check them very seldom because the unread stuff will slide off of newsblur's limited post queue

When I look at a feed with the 'All / Newest' setting, it is showing me stuff that is over 3 years old. Maybe just the view you are using?

Here's the specific issue

https://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/topics/unread_items_are...

Maybe the feeds you're loading still include posts from 3 years ago? So the posts are still being loaded recently.

I have never understood why RSS, in addition to being a document format, doesn't include a specification for a really simple API that supports requesting the full archives for a feed. Every feed could be responsible for providing its own canonical archive. It would be a trivial addition to the implementation of blogging software, and would be immensely useful.

This is a brilliant idea. First I've heard of it, and I run NewsBlur. Where were you when the RSS spec was being worked on!

TBF, Newsblur doesn't enjoy the craploads of infrastructure that Google has.

Sorry, I don't agree: heavy Google Reader user and now a NewsBlur one. While I appreciate the NewsBlur existence it is very very very slow while Google Reader was extremely fast. I don't know if NewsBlur only retrieves my feeds when I start a request or if it constantly retrieves them on the backend.

Disclosure: I have 2350 feeds in NewsBlur.

Is that... normal? 2350 feeds seems like an astronomical amount of news feeds. Can I ask how much of that do you read?

Agreed, very curious how much of that actually gets even glanced over.

I thought I was information overload with ~150 sites. I hope OP uses the 'focus' features so they can get a modicum of information from those 2350 feeds.

It's possible that many of those could be discarded without being read. As an example, I'm subscribed to the Best Of Metafilter RSS feed, but if I'm on vacation for a week and come back to over a hundred posts, I just mark 'em all as read.

But is your intention really to read every post by every site you're subscribed to? Someone subscribed to over 1000 sites isn't trying to avoid missed posts - they're just dipping into the stream of sites they're interested in at any given moment.

Read every post, no. But at least get a general idea of the posts for the sites I subscribe to. There are a couple of sites that I let over lapse, HN is a good example, but for the most part, I atleast read the headlines / tags of posts for sites.

One nice feature of newsblur, which I don't use often and not sure if it is available in other readers, but the intelligence trainer would probably help in instances where you have a lot of sites and don't necessarily bother reviewing all posts.

Maybe I just use RSS readers differently. But if I were just going to periodically review what a site has, I would probably go to the site periodically rather than clutter up my list of feeds.

I am in the same boat and I simply quickly go through the 50-100 posts of the sites per day. I actually open maybe 10% in the browser. Following small sites and blogs about your interests gives you the best quality of the web in my opinion.

> I thought I was information overload with ~150 sites.

It mainly depends of the feed volume, not how many feeds are you subscribed to. I cherry picked a lot of personal blogs that are not updated often.

That was my perception, a lot of personal blogs, thank you for clarifying.

Somewhat unrelated, but it would be neat if there was some kind of lost and found for RSS as I have sites from the early 00s that I followed which are no longer updated but I imagine the author just changed their site, etc.

Yes, I think this is one of the issues related to Internet archeology. Not equal but similar to the recovery of Usenet discussions.

NewsBlur has an organizer that provides this exact info. Just sort of last update (or even stories per month) and mass delete. It's somewhat new but it makes a world of a difference. The organizer is on web and just launched on iOS. See http://blog.newsblur.com.

You can add a lot of low-volume sites without having them pile up too much, also I break out my feeds in groups and that makes them a lot easier to go through.

I have around 1500. Most are not active, though.

And I wouldn't take the claim seriously that Google Reader was fast with that many feeds; I found that GR struggled with that feeds: http://the-digital-reader.com/2012/11/01/i-broke-google-read...

I think this is a good discussion to have. One thing is to be subscribed to thousands of feeds from major media sites where you receive a huge amount of articles every day and another to be subscribed to specific blogs with sporadic articles. I have more of the later.

Only from VCs I have more than 200.

Downvotes to this are very suspicious since it is a fact that goes in the opposite direction of other comments in the thread.

I suspect your disclosure (2300 feeds!) overly negated what would have been valid criticism of the tool...

No, how many e-mails do you have in GMail? Had this downvotes asked how do I use these feeds?

Maybe try bazqux. Super fast, written in haskell https://bazqux.com/faq

I have about 1100 feeds and have found that newsblur is pretty good as long as I'm not (a) on safari and (b) leaving the tab open for a long time. (that is, it's fine on chrome, and it's fine on safari if I close the tab after a while).

I've found FeedHQ[1] paired with Reeder[2] to be even better than Google Reader for my purposes (checking hundreds of feeds daily, archiving interesting posts locally, and syncing read posts with iOS).

[1] https://feedhq.org "Import and export your data as OPML, use the API to back it up or build amazing apps on top of FeedHQ. You can even run your own FeedHQ instance or help improving it, it's open-source!"

[2] http://reederapp.com/mac/ "A news reader for Feedbin, Feedly, Feed Wrangler, FeedHQ, NewsBlur, The Old Reader, Inoreader, Minimal Reader, BazQux Reader, Fever, Readability and Instapaper."

I'm also a happy newsblur user. The free tier is more than enough for my needs, but I was so happy with the service I decided to pay the annual subscription

Another happy NewsBlur customer here. It's by far the best replacement I've found.

Same here, I stuck with Reader till its final week and then switched to newsblur. Haven't regretted paying for it yet!

I tried to like Newsblur (in fact, I paid for 3 years), but couldn't - it's just way too "over the top" for me. I ended up signing up (and paying too) for Yoleo Reader. I guess, functionality-wise it's no match Newsblur's, but it's much easier to use too.

I've been using Feedbin very happily, myself. Contra a lot of people here, I almost never can't find a feed when I want one.

Reader's neglect and eventual shutdown were annoying, but hardly heartbreaking. I miss the massive search history, but that's all.

Same. It's the only reader that has intuitive keyboard shortcuts to navigate the selection between the feed, article list, and the actual article. And it looks nice. Well worth $3/mo.

I just want to second that, it's working perfectly.

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