Hacker News Reader

Comment by sikhnerd | Hacker News Reader

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?

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