A better mobile version of HN. Please review my weekend project

On the iPhone, and I think also on Android devices, you can prevent a page from being zoomed withe the following meta tag :

<meta name="viewport" content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;"/>

But this tag isn't being used here, as far I can see.

You're welcome. I'm happy to hear that it's useful.

I'm actually using that for a bigger project that I'm working on. While working on it, and having done so HTML processing with it, I realized that it wouldn't take me to long to wire up a mobile version of HN that uses it.

You can pass any URL through it on this form: http://toadjaw.com/article

Yes that was some frustration with me too. I do this: if the connection times out (10 seconds) while reading HN, it'll serve the last successful scrape of HN. That's the reason I put the last fetched date on the page, I don't want anybody to be worried that they are receiving a stale version.

The comment pages don't yet serve cached pages if the fetch fails... working on that.

You didn't use the "Article Text" feature, did you? I think that's a really great feature. Especially if you're on a slow connection.

Like Jakob pointed out, I added the ability to pull the text of the linked article, which still needs some tweaking but works for most normal blog/news articles. It really makes articles readable on phones. It's based arc90's readability.

In addition, I added in the ability to read the comments and made them collapsible (like reddit).

But yes, if you only want the list of the front page links, the RSS will do.

I plan on adding more features soon: -Make comments sortable by date or points -More extensive caching of the comment pages along with the article text (in case either go down) -Improve the overall look and feel

That should be doable with just CSS. I put on a "settings" page on my TODO list to do just that.

This will be my #1 priority.

Anything in particular you were thinking of? I'm not sure I quite get the feedback.

I really like icombinator but I wanted to address some problems and add new features (View the article text, collapse/expand comments, and return to the previous position when using the browsers back button).

That sounds very doable. I'll eventually have a settings page to set those kinds of options. Thanks for using it!

The official API is to scrape the HTML

Do you know where to find a HN icon in ico format?

EDIT: Duh... HN itself has one. I'll use it.

EDIT: Ok, I added it. Thanks for reminding me about this.

If it is any consolation it doesn't look very nice on the iPhone in landscape either.

For the home page, I request the HTML from HN, process it, and create a collection of elements that represent a HN news item: URL, Title, # of comments, ID, Posted By, Date, and so on. Then use that to generate the new HTML. I cache that for 200 seconds and store a copy in the event that I can't read the HTML from HN.

Works just about the same way for the comments , except it adds some additional functionality like collapsing comments. With the nature of comments being nested, a recursive function worked really well on rendering the output.

The article text functionality uses the algorithm from arc 90's readability project, which is in javascript. I used the main idea behind their readability algorithm for this, except mine runs server side (C#) where theirs is all done on the client.

For the front page or the comment pages?

I just removed it. I was wondering if that would turn people off. Thanks for the feedback. Now that you mention it, I really don't like links opening in a new window/tab either.

Yeah, shouldn't be hard. I'll add that to my list.