NewsBlur (hosted feed reader) | Hacker News Reader

NewsBlur (hosted feed reader)

newsblur.com

70 pointsswah25 comments

I like this a lot. I'm a lil too cheap to buy, but I'll at least throw in a word of appreciation :)

This is almost an essential service; it's what Google Reader should be; it's slicker, tasteful and fast.

Some suggested improvements: The toolbar buttons are cryptic, and takes time to find out. I was hunting for the prefs button.

I wish there was an offline option too. Still then, great job! One less Google service to use :)

Comments last time this came up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1834305

A ton has happened in the past year since I launched NewsBlur. River of News, iPhone app, Android app, an official API, major speed improvements on both the backend and frontend, a public user-support forum, and many, many user-customizations.

Heck, just check out the activity graph on GitHub: http://github.com/samuelclay (and follow me there... I live on props and need your love).

The next year is going to be full of improvements: search, major upgrades to the [free] iPhone app, and more social features that you can shake a stick at. My stomach-butterflies are tingling just at the thought of the cool shit I get to build next.

Wait, what the hell? This is open source? How do you make money? This is amazing! I'm switching over to it right now.

Open-source doesn't have to mean non-profit. I make money with premium accounts -- accounts are free up until 64 feeds. Also, feeds are updated more often for premium users (but only for feeds that they are the sole subscriber, otherwise they get the collective benefit of multiple subscribers).

Sure, folks can host their own copy of NewsBlur and keep it up to date. But it's a PitA, and I have 7 servers happily chugging away fetching, parsing, storing, and retrieving feeds for you. Hosting is worth is a lot.

The main idea behind open-sourcing the code is so that a community can develop around the API, new features, and user-contributed code. I've had a number of pull requests and issues found in the code thanks to NewsBlur's many talented developer users.

Oh, sure, the two questions were actually sort of unrelated. The "I can't be arsed" factor is pretty high on this, so I'd probably get an account rather than set my own thing up, but it's nice to know that I can if I need to. To clarify, the open source version has everything the premium account has, correct?

Yes, it does, but setting up a premium account for yourself is not automatic. You need to know how to read code to do it. Here are the relevant Python commands:

    >>> u = User.objects.get(username='StavrosK')
    >>> u.profile.active_premium()

That will flip the premium bit on your account. Perhaps I should add that to the self-hosting documentation.

Ah, thanks. I'm assuming the admin interface will also work? Regardless, I have found my old Newsblur account and will keep on using that, I'm a far cry from 64 feeds anyway (I think I only have one or two unique ones).

Thanks again for a great product!

Also, this is driving me crazy, but how do you mark something as unread? The UI is a bit frustrating, I spent a minute looking for the logout link :/ How can I remove feeds completely? How can I reimport things from Google Reader if I've registered already? How can I see a stream of everything, rather than only one feed?

I remember the first time I saw your site and thought, interesting name. Simply for the fact that I'm the founder of fotoblur.com and wireblur.com. It was easy to find domain names after attaching 'blur' to the name (a 3 month search for fotoblur) :)! For photography it kind of made sense.

@conesus: However I'm curious. How did you decide on the name? I'm not claiming any inspiration, however, according to whois the newsblur.com was registered on 18-feb-2009 whereas fotoblur was on 28-sep-2007 ;)!

Motorola also got in on the act: https://portal-moto.svcmot.com/moto-web-portal/

At one point I changed the name to Protoread, meaning Read the Original [site]. It took about 24 hours before I switched to Protopub. And then 3 days later, right back to NewsBlur.

To be honest, I used the word blur because when following dozens, if not hundreds of sites, they all start to blur together. So I hooked on to that mental picture and embraced the dilemma. Might as well know what you're getting into--NewsBlur.

The S. Jobs recommendation on the subject of naming businesses was to find a good word within the domain, then make it sexy. I'm struggling to think of the examples that would complete this anecdote, but NewsBlur is about as sexy a name as a feed reader gets.

@conesus: how cool that this is also open source. How is using SQL + NoSQL working for you? Also, Django: most folks say you hit a wall and its hard to swap components... but you seem to be doing fine with it?

Very nice but it seems to me that you are proxying only the top page off blogs and not the resources referenced by that page, including scripts, which is a security issue.

Ah, I started using this last year but havent checked it out in a while. It looks great and works really well, but I just tend to forget about these things sometimes.

NewsBlur is great - thanks conesus! Bought a subscription a few months ago and it's worked great for me.

I don't see a way of sharing items as a feed (like the shared items in Google Reader), is this possible? If I can do this I would be happy to use NewsBlur! Because I gave a try to Tiny Tiny RSS and it just don't do it for me. I still have to try RSSLounge, but I like NewsBlur.

Is this still a one-man operation? I'm very impressed with it (and even more so if it's just you) and have showed some of my coworkers.

How much time do you dedicate to developing and maintaining NewsBlur? Do you do this full time now?

Hardly full-time. I have 45 minutes in the morning on Caltrain, and 45 minutes back. I work 3-4 hours on one of the weekend days, and occasionally an hour or two on weekday nights. For 28 months now.

I tried this about a year ago. At the time, it was not so good. Looks like they improved it a lot! I like it!

Dude. This is pretty cool. The stats on the front page are interesting. 104 playing users already

Actually, I'm nearing 500 premium users. That's the number of premium users using NewsBlur in the past 24 hours. In fact, all of those stats are aggregate for the past 24 hours.

It's the kind of transparency that I think goes hand-in-hand with being open-source. Why bother hiding it? I'm constantly watching those stats, so maybe other folks may also be interested. It also helps to know when there's a ton of activity, in case the site feels slow. Although it's been a long time that having a huge spike in traffic has made the site slow. Check that average load time graph. Notice how even though the number of feeds loaded has spiked in the past 3 hours, the average load time has actually gone down. Stats, for those who care, are endlessly fascinating.

This was built while riding NYC subway lines.

Specifically the A train. But I have since moved to San Francisco, so now much of it is built on MUNI (N train) and Caltrain. But boy do I miss the focus that being on a crowded and uncomfortable subway car brings you.

This site is overwhelmingly busy. I can't tell what's going on. I can't tell what it's supposed to do, so I can't tell if it's doing it well. One thing is clear though: it's an eyesore.

Agreed, functionally it seems to work pretty well, but with so much going on, it was very difficult to make sense of.

Keep your backend, but look to Reeder or other similar feed readers for inspiration to improve your UI/UX and this will become a great product.

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