HackRSS - browse HN posts visually | Hacker News Reader

HackRSS - browse HN posts visually

hackrss.com

110 pointsbgraves41 comments

Visually appealing, but needs longer titles and link to HN comments. I usually find the comments more enjoyable to read than the source articles.

I love the recursion when it reaches the "HackRSS - browse HN posts visually" post in the feed :)

Any chance you could include more of the title text and the link to the comments?

And the number of comments and the number of upvotes, please.

And perhaps the 3 top comments (the first N characters of each)

I wonder if with a few more upvotes we'll see the Droste effect.

A little competition for http://hn.embed.ly? Heh. We think rich data makes much better previews then screenshots. What does HN think about this site vs. hn.embed.ly?

I think this would benefit greatly from some sort of collapse feature. The nice thing about browsing titles-only ("vanilla") HN is that things that I don't want to read take up very minimal screen space. With this, I had to work too hard to scroll past this entry: http://i.imgur.com/Z9t67.png

You can navigate using keyboard (j/k).

You can also fold the article with 'd', and show the top comment with 'c'. Shift+C opens the comment thread too. Pressing '?' will bring up a box that lists all the shortcuts:

   j or →    Select next article
   k or ←    Select previous article
   c         Toggle Hacker News top comment
   shift + c Open Hacker News comments page in a new window
   d         Toggle article content
   enter     Follow the article link in this window
   shift + enter Follow the article link in a new window
   ?         Show this keyboard shortcuts dialog

It takes all types to make the world go round. Lets do lunch.

Perhaps a feature like this could bring the best of all worlds. The ability for anyone to change the view to fit how they want to browse.

http://i.imgur.com/KdOR5.jpg

I've been playing with visual (screenshot-based) readers for a few years now, with my most recent effort being 'Percolater', a visual reader for the iPad. When demoing Percolater to current iPad users that are used to 'intelligent' content re-arrangers like Flipboard, Pulse, and hn.embed.ly, the people that tend to prefer a screenshot representation tend to be those that are more on the design end of the spectrum. There is a tremendous amount of context contained within the layout of a given page, and we've become very good at determining the likelihood that a page will be worth reading purely based on layout cues. Snapshots have the ability to further allow us to pre-filter what's important. There are a great many people that feel that ad removal is unequivocally a good thing, and for them, pulling out some text and an image and shoving it in a box is perfectly suitable for their browsing needs. I don't happen to be one of those people, hence the thing I've made.

This kind of UI would work well on other HN-like sites, e.g. links to pretty web designs, but the nature of HN links means the screenshots are almost all the same thing: an article, a possible image, some ads or links on the side.

Because of the extra space taken up by screenshots, the most important thing - link title - has to be truncated, and it's not showing vote/comment counts.

It's always good to experiment with UIs, but in this case, I think the experiment shows the UI is more suited to other kinds of links.

Very well done. I would like to also see this done for various news feed (maybe most popular links on Twitter/Facebook). EDIT: Happy user of URL2PNG.

I think url2png is really cool, but I was a bit pissed when from one day to the next they went to a subscription model and added sign-up links to all screenshots. Their fair right, of course, but no fun if you just started using it.

Just send us an email, we'll help you out.

Thanks, will do! :)

I have been using the service for over 3 months and I remember telling the founder I would pay for it. Well. looks like I am going to send my check now :). Gladly.

Just a small update: The url2png guys helped me out! Thanks again guys :)

Here's a search experience for you, same idea: http://hnsearch.heroku.com/ :)

Quite cool, but the titles shouldn't be cut.

I agree. This is more of a proof-of-concept / demo of the url2png api. If the post looks interesting to you, just hover over the image thumbnail to view the title.

I usually enjoy visual browsers like this, but here the previews are too small for it to click for me. Just to provide a counterexample, this one is pretty cool and along similar lines: http://news.peepcode.com/

Ask and ye shall receive bigger screenshots.

Excellent! And I love the browsing and picture in picture recursion: HackRSS -> HackRSS :-)

all I can see is a gray box for the hackrss screenshot

How is this useful? I agree with bgraves, it is more of a proof-of-concept of url2png.

I worked on something similar to this a couple of months back: http://hackernewsbot.posterous.com. Never finished it though.

Cool. I would love to be able to scroll through this using the j and k keys, like Google Reader or http://ffffound.com/.

very cool. I've always wanted this.

and now that we have this, I realize that the end result is that I will now end up reading articles that have nice designs. i.e. judging by the cover.

I love the concept, but I'd rather have the links open in the same window. Just change your target attributes and I will switch over to this solution permanently.

Agreed and done. Be sure to bookmark it though. ;)

Nicely done but I find the default view much easier to navigate. A JavaScript-switch between default and with pictures would be nice though.

perhaps a Google Instant Preview style extension where you hover over the default view link and a screenshot is displayed on the side? That would be a great browser extension!

Well, I looked. It was not obvious how to view the comments, so I probably won't ever go back. Sorry, them's the apples.

Kudos for Droste effect of HackRSS showing the HackRSS post showing HackRSS showing the HackRSS post.

Could not fork. The repository's default branch is empty.

Somebody let the cat out of the bag a bit early. Watch the repo and you'll be notified when we commit v1.

Can we have a place that lists all the HN related sites? Or maybe PG can create such a page and link it at the top/bottom. That would be useful instead of them getting lost in the old posts and people who haven't seen the posts missing them.

http://hnresources.com/ is one.

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