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Comment by arussellsaw | Hacker News Reader

Hello! author here, i just wanted to address a few things i've seen in the comments:

* i absolutely built this for fun, it's an idea i had late at night and needed to scratch that itch

* the scolling sucks, laying out arbitrarily sized articles into a given layout is a challenge, and the scrolling hides a lot of the sins. I'm going to switch to truncating articles this evening, and linking to a single article page.

* thanks for the suggestions on hyphenation, i've been playing with a few different approaches but none have worked with all the browsers i tried, i'll give a few suggestions a go this evening!

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Love to see experiments like this with web articles. Have you thought about making it more print focused? It's the kind of layout I'd want to print out and read offline.

I've experimented a little with trying to create more readable, printable layouts of web articles and feeds on https://www.fivefilters.org [1],[2] but yours has a much more traditional newspaper look which could look great in print.

[1] Simple Print for single articles https://pdf.fivefilters.org/simple-print/

[2] PDF from feed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=854Csokl3QA

Love it! It's great to see web design finally start to scale to large and wide screens. I hope this is the start of a movement.

Have you seen pressreader.com's layout? eg. https://thewashingtonpost.pressreader.com/the-washington-pos...

They have some really nice ideas, implemented well. See for example how the articles click to expand. And the horizontal scrolling there works so well with the columns!

Have you tried using a CSS "masonry" approach to address the varying sizes of the articles?

For example: https://w3bits.com/css-masonry/

Also, check out Isotope. Seems to handle different-sized "cells" fairly neatly - https://isotope.metafizzy.co/layout-modes.html

CSS columns?

BTW, you can do very complex transforms with XSLT on RSS https://www.bennadel.com/rss also take a look on feedburner

I loved the NYTimes "Times Reader", circa 2008, when it was released.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/packages/html/fi...

You might want to look into it for design inspiration since the NYTimes solved for a lot of design problems I'm sure you've had to tackle/consider.

Great work btw.

@arussellsaw - might want to have a closer look at this [0] for some inspiration

[0] https://wwweeebbb.com/

Wow, what a great idea, and largely fantastic implementation! It really looks good.

Do RSS feeds have "just" text that you pull to get the article content, or are you parsing the webpage somehow? If so, how?

I've done something slightly (well, about 1% :-) similar for the "Popular" page on pinboard[0]. It used to have a line or two from the start of the article, using a webpage content extractor that got turned off, so I can't use it anymore.

One arguably nice thing about mine is that it's updated once a day, and it remembers what you've read yesterday, so new articles are marked, and you can flip a switch to see the new stuff first.

Thanks!

[0] https://pbpb.cls.cloud

RSS feeds are a bit of a mess, but only due to each publisher's implementation being slightly different. the vast majority only send a headline and summary on the RSS feed, i then have to go and scrape and extract the article on the backend to populate the content, which is it's own challenge and i've not gotten it to work for a few sites yet.

This is also running in a semi-serverless container in Google Cloud Run (only costs me £1 a month!) so fetching and re-caching all of that when a new container is scheduled is painful, however it seems like state in the container is persisted longer than i initially thought, so it's good enough for now.

Cool, thanks! I'm doing a lot with AWS serverless, it's a great way to go (and similarly cheap). Any chance you could open-source your scraping code?

You might have come across this already, but we maintain a collection of article extraction rules for various sites here https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config - it was adapted from a database maintained by Instapaper in its early days and today has contributions mainly from users and developers of an open source Instapaper/Pocket alternative called Wallabag: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag

Also usable with a free version of Full-Text RSS available here: https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss/src/master/

This looks really interesting! I've been building an RSS reader for myself in my free time, and this will be really useful. I was wondering if you know anything about the legal implications around scraping full-content like this and packaging it up? I was planning to do it with some fun added-on features, but was worried it would be considered copy-right infringement (since I would basically be re-hosting other site's content without permission). And some websites outright ban this kind of usage in the TOS for their RSS feeds. For example, from the Washington Post[1]

> a. For any article, you may not display more text than we provide in the RSS feed.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/rss-terms-of-service/2012/01/...

AWESOME! Thanks so much, I'll look into that. I think it was the Instapaper service I was using back in the day.

I showed this to my old father and he laughed for a long 1 minute. It was really an unexpected surprise.

> I'm going to switch to truncating articles this evening, and linking to a single article page.

Ah, much better now.

Paper newspapers do this in spades, so this behavior shouldn’t surprise most people.

I hate to say his, but you might have to turn on justification to make it look more paper-like. In doing so you can get rid of many of the vertical separator lines (but you might need to be more conservative with max columns)

if it's supposed to be laid out like a newspaper shouldn't it use column-count etc. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/01/css-multiple-column...

It seemed like everything was flex? maybe I'm wrong, and I missed it somewhere?

This is awesome!

Now if you could just get an AI to rewrite the content to bring it up to the old (roughly pre-"USA Today") journalistic standards, it would be perfect!

But that's probably too much to ask.

I second this, reminds me of this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/c13uq/i_just_fo...

> All votes shall be counted by honest and stalwart men of virtue

Hah, had a good laugh out of this. Thanks for sharing.

This is exactly what I've been looking for. Thanks! Other than scrolling it looks really good.

Do you use any framework for the frontend? If so, could you open source it?

Thanks! I’m glad you like it

The CSS framework i use is https://bulma.io and the server side rendering is all done with Go’s html/template library.

I’m definitely going to open source it but I’m too ashamed of the code right now, this evening is going to be cleaning and ‘production using’ the code

I love the scrolling! My first thought was "finally a way to read the whole rss feed without the need to click on a link". I'd keep it that way.

Also, I think that the scrolling feature is one of the most innovative things I've seen in many years on how to format articles on the web. It makes a lot of sense to be honest IMH.

This is awesome! Love the idea, do you intend to make this a bigger project?

I think it’s awesome :)

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