Hacker News Reader

Comment by Casperin | Hacker News Reader

I built this with a friend. We wanted a reader that is simple and fast and can be navigated using shortcuts, but isn't a single page application.

Sorry about not really showing anything before you sign up. It's very mvp right now. You can just use a throw-away email if you like :)

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Perhaps start everyone off with a guest/sample account? I use Node w/ Express for my servers and in the ones that use logins I usually do something like this:

  app.use((req, res, next) => {
    req.user = req.user ||
               usersBySession[req.cookies.session] ||
               {
      logged_in: false,
      username: 'Guest'
    }
  }
  
  app.get('/api/getfeeds', (req, res) => {
    if (!req.user || !req.user.logged_in) {
      res.status(403).send(false);
      return;
    }
  }

Yeah, we should totally do something like this if there is any real interest in this.

This post is to gauge that interest and it's our mini launch. (We are two beers into the celebration :)

A demo account would be very much appreciated. I love RSS and use FreshRSS heavily, but registering for this is above my effort threshold for something like this.

It is literally as easy as login in. Just type an email address and a password twice and you are in. You can change your email address later if you need.

When you register, there is a suggested feed (xkcd) that you can add.

I haven't tested it, but it really reminds me of Miniflux. Would you mind comparing your product to Miniflux? Also, what is the business model?

I can try. We haven't used Miniflux at all. We only tried it out a bit before we started working on our own.

* Miniflux is great. It's the closest to what we'd like.

* It is self-hosted and Open Source. Ours is not.

* It uses more JS than we do. And JS is required, I think (it's not in weloverss).

* Miniflux currently has more features than we do.

As for the business model. For now it's completely free because we just want to gauge interest. But the idea is to add a subscription fee in the future. We really don't like ads, so that seems to be our only good option.

Miniflux works fine without JS, it's used just for few things like keyboard shortcuts or the "fetch original content" button.

Oh that's cool. I stand corrected :)

Too much effort to sign up and authenticate for a quick peek. Could you set up a “guest” account with one-click login for exploration? Not to put down your effort, but this will really help the audience (and I say this as someone very interested in RSS aggregators/readers)

Just put asdf@example.com (or something like that) and click register and you are in! We only use the email for retrieving forgotten passwords.

Great, thanks for clarifying!

Yeah no prob. You can also change the email later if you need to. We aren't really that strict about it.

i really love this. i wish the entire internet was like it.

This is my preferred type of interface. Simple, fast, solid, to the point, and with shortcuts for (almost) everything.

... and I say that as someone whose day job for the past 7 or so years, has been building SPAs. Not all of us thinks tons of JS is the way to go.

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