Show HN: newsola - top news stories at a glance | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: newsola - top news stories at a glance

newsola.com

17 pointskirchhoff24 comments

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Was instantly reminded of this: http://newsmap.jp/

Seems to be a very direct clone, down to the colours, but using a different back-end system.

It's a different front-end too (JS instead of Flash). But the author not even mentioning Newsmap in the about is low.

You're right, that was an error on my part. I have added a new comment.

Yes, it borrows very heavily from NewsMap, a site which I admire but requires Flash.

My first few reactions were "why can't I X" only to discover I could in fact X: Select my country, eliminate categories, etc. The only thing left is to perhaps rearrange the categories (business, then national, then world, e.g., but that's a quibble).

Zooming the page increases/decreases the number of stories per category, which is quite cool (if perhaps counter-intuitive, but OK). But would it be possible to have an absolute "no smaller than" minimum size for the menu? (I've zoomed in a few times via "ctrl -" and the menu bar is now unreadably small.)

On a related note, as I zoom in, I get more stories, but the font for existing stories remains the same as before the zoom, with their blocks occupying roughly the same amount of screen space as before the zoom; this means that newly added stories are in tiny blocks and tiny fonts: as I zoom, new stories become unreadably small.

It would be good to have an absolute "no smaller than" minimum for newly added stories as well, scaling down the size of existing stories; I'm OK with different font sizes for relative importance, but existing stories should decrease in size to accommodate new stories as I zoom to add more.

EDIT -- It would also be nice to be able to close particular boxes (display an X in the top right corner when I hover there?) and have that story replaced with another from that category.

(And it would be waaaay cool if there was some way to mark stories as seen and to not display them again... ...when I revisit the page, I only see things new since the last time, or not displayed the last time. That way, the page is always new. No idea how to do this without a server/account on your end, but it could be cool....)

Cool app. I am adding it to my regularly checked folder of news sites.

I had not considered zoom functionality at all. I'm not sure that it's possible to specify that an element shouldn't be resized (the menu), I'll have to investigate.

Your suggestions are great, I will try to implement them, thanks.

The more I use newsola, the more I like it. Do you have a donation page? I will gladly cough up $$ for features I like.

I'd like to be able to get the unique union of two feeds, i.e., the union of

www.newsola.com/#/ca/tc

and

www.newsola.com/#/us/tc

without any duplicates.

That way, I would have three bookmarks:

http://www.newsola.com/#/ca/w,n,b - my default Canada-centric news page

http://www.newsola.com/#/ca/tc/UNION/#/us/tc - for tech

www.newsola.com/#/ca/s/PLUS/#/ca/e/UNION/#/us/e - for sports and entertainment (emphasis on CDN sport, i.e., more hockey, less baseball, with US and CA entertainment - in fact, I could add Britain too, e.g., to keep up with Blake's 7 and Red Dwarf news).

Make any sense? Not sure how this might work, but I'll play PHB and throw impossible features at you as a challenge! :->

(I'm not sure why "Romney, Santorum battle in Michigan" is such a large business item in my CA/B feed, but OK, I can live with that... :->)

Combining multiple countries shouldn't be a problem, but I'll have to modify the UI a bit.

Sports subcategories I've looked at as well, but it starts to get messy and I wanted to keep everything simple.

I don't think I could accept donations, but I'll try to add those features when I have time!

Thanks

I should mention that this is essentially a clone of the excellent NewsMap (www.newsmap.jp), but written in JS instead of Flash.

Looks nice, I would recommend it to my friends for a quick glance of news. But I would like to bring the attention of the author to the comment of nuttendorfer. The two sites seem very similar and you should either mention it somewhere, or try to differentiate yours in the design part

I have added a comment reflecting this.

i like the design - i don't think the animation adds much though. For all the stuff that's going on in the world and how the other aggregators behave, i think that just 5-6 stories showing up is not enough when I click sometimes. Your categories are a little weak "Lin" shows up in news of the World, Apple shows up in National. Keep tweaking - there is definitely room for a better news aggregator and being able to easily switch to other national editions is great!

How do you decide which stories are more important? Would be interesting if you let users curate and present their own newsola frontpages.

The stories are taken from Google News who themselves aggregrate stories from news sources. The "importance" is defined by the number of media outlets covering a particular story.

I'd like it more if apple-mobile-web-app-capable was set. But nice work!

I experimented with that, but if you click a link from the "app" it loads the browser, with no easy way back to the app.

Should work cross browser / device. Any comments would be welcomed.

On iPhone, when I click about, the contact section is cut off.

Colorful!

Looks awesome. How are you seeding the stories?

They are taken from the Google News RSS feeds.

Any chance of integrating the "Top Stories" section?

Indeed - it is on my todo list.

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