Comment by amatriain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amatriain | Hacker News Reader

I develop and maintain an open source RSS reader. In my experience it's not so bad. I strip CSS and javascript from feeds, and most of them are displayed fine anyway. I don't think I've ever found a feed that needed javascript to load content, it seems even SPAs include plain entry content in their feeds, thankfully. I've never found a feed that became unreadable after stripping styling either.

I agree it's interesting to look at your content when loaded in an RSS reader. IMHO most feeds are actually more readable when loaded in a clean uncluttered RSS reader than in the original webpage. If the content is good, the reading experience should not be harmed by focusing just on its text and images and removing extra styling.

Shameless plug: the RSS reader I maintain is https://www.feedbunch.com , comments are welcome.

I also think it is not so bad. It is the responsibility of the reader to style the content, for example to auto-size images via css so they don't get too big. If the reader does that, the feed content will in 99.99% of all cases be at least as readable as with the original styling.

Feedbunch looks great, all I want from an RSS reader is to show me a list of my feeds, and to show me the unread items in each feed, which it seems to do beautifully! Unfortunately, I dislove the fact that it clicking on a list item would just show "loading..." forever :(

Firefox 46.0.1 on Ubuntu with uBlock, if it helps.

It certainly shouldn't do that. Unfortunately I cannot reproduce it, it works fine here.

Loading entries (among other things) is done with web workers. Are you blocking the execution of web workers or dynamic loading of remote javascripts, by any chance?

I shouldn't be. What's worse, it works fine now. Yesterday I didn't even get the tutorial, which makes me think that some JS wouldn't load. I think I'll switch to it as my default reader, thank you!

EDIT: Ah, the demo worked but my signed-up account does not.

EDIT 2: It works erratically.

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