HN Show & Tell: Feedvolley | Hacker News Reader

HN Show & Tell: Feedvolley

feedvolley.com

7 pointsnir8 comments

This is not a startup, just a little pet project. It lets users skin RSS feeds with their own HTML, for example to skin existing web content or complement Yahoo! Pipes etc.

I'd love to get some feedback on this if you find it interesting. There's some more background here: http://niryariv.wordpress.com/category/projects/feedvolley/

Please keep in mind this is not a commercial site, so there may be some rough edges and missing parts ;)

BTW, I'm looking for UI input on the following: the real meat of the app is in the Customize page, especially the "Use Custom HTML" option. I have a feeling many users just create a page and never notice they can customize the HTML, URL etc. Any ideas how to make it more prominent yet keep from taking focus from the actual content?

I really enjoyed working with Nir on this one. Very interested to hear where the user experience can be refined to make it even easier and more accessible for the masses to use.

It may seem obvious, but the main way you're going to draw attention to that link is by making it bigger.

Also consider styling "Customize" and "Create a page like this" as buttons instead of just links. They both indicate actions, not just another document to load.

Look at what firefox does when you view an rss feed in the browser. Above the feed content is a large yellow callout area with a subscribe button.

You can do something similar and offer an option to collapse the area which gets remembered by a cookie.

Thanks! We didn't really think of an FF-like collapse area like you suggest, I think it might be the way to go.

I like the idea of cutting the crap and just displaying an RSS feed. The themes you have there are also really nice. Nice work!

Thanks! Except for the default & Gallery themes, they are all adapted Tumblr themes - the folks who made them deserve the credit :) We chose Tumblr's markup and try to support it as well as we can, to give users a large potential selection to choose from.

I think I will be using this in combination with my Posterous blog.

Sweet :) It's cool to see people use it in ways we didn't think of.

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