Comment by conesus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by conesus | Hacker News Reader

I think the biggest problem with RSS is that you divorce the content from the context. Both from the publisher's standpoint, when their ads aren't being served or they decide to truncate their RSS feed so they can get ad revenue back from click-through, and from the reader's standpoint, where a common lamentation in moving to RSS is that you no longer get to read the original site regularly.

I solved the "Original site" problem by building the original site into NewsBlur -- http://www.newsblur.com.

The other big issue with RSS is that there are too many stories with a low signal-to-noise ratio. I built in filtering and highlighting into NewsBlur to address that concern. And it's a completely separate backend from Google Reader.

And now the common refrain is that people use social channels (Twitter/FB/Tumblr) to find links and news. So I just built that into NewsBlur with shared stories. You can sign up to be a part of the private beta at http://dev.newsblur.com. I'll send out invites to anybody who signs up.

Consuming the web through RSS can be problematic for both publishers and readers. I'm addressing the big three issues - context, relevancy, and surfacing - with a strong commitment to both readers and publishers. Let me know what else you would expect to see in your ideal reading setup, and chances are, RSS offers the foundation to build it.

I switched over to NewsBlur from Google Reader in December (after there was a post about it on HN) and haven't looked back. I even emailed the creator once with an issue I was having and received a prompt and helpful response. Try that with Google Reader!

Whoaaaaa, this is some hot hot hot JS. Thanks for open-sourcing this. I do a similar thing with http://somaseek.com/ (same basic concept only it's only reading XML from SomaFM ), and reddit is also open-source with a live "reference" implementation :)

I hope Google picks something like this up (or hey, just /hires you/ if you're into that) and re-does Reader for 2012 :)

I hope not. Samuel found a perfect niche market for a bootstrapped start-up, and acquisition by a big company would probably mean the end of NewsBlur. If you really like it, make sure to buy a subscription.

"Context"? Don't you mean "design"? I regard the fact that I don't have to view most blogs in their original look one of the best features of RSS, saves me from activating Readability all the time.

There's a Feed view, which is what you're referring to, as well as an Original view. There is also a Story view, which shows you the click-through of the story, which is convenient for some feeds, like Hacker News.

The majority of sites that I personally subscribe to are individual writers. I want to read their writing in the exact format that they intended it to be read. Daring Fireball comes to mind.

I'm aware of the different NewsBlur features, I'm not saying that I don't like the software (if only it didn't have such a huge stack needed to run it…). And it's great that I can choose. I just wanted to state where I stand in the content vs. presentation issue. Even most a-list bloggers often have pretty unreadable, if pretty, layouts. I'd include DF there, by the way…

I'm also not quite sure about the ad argument, i.e that you're eliminating the revenue of bloggers. The feeds themselves can contain ads, there's the compromise of abstracted posts in feeds, and then there's the distinct possibility that users who are proficient enough to use RSS also have something like AdBlock installed. Personally, I see more ads in feeds than on actual sites, due to dedicated feed readers not blocking ads, and the relative low level of annoyance doesn't prompt me to use a filtering proxy for that - never mind that I could on mobile devices…

One thing that I dislike about reading in RSS readers is that it's getting somewhat more common to include interactive things in blog posts, and I'd like to see those (and encourage that trend). Things like having a running example of a code snippet, or interactive statistics/data-viz stuff. Sometimes JS/canvas/SVG stuff works in Google Reader, but often it's broken, and non-browser-based readers usually don't even try.

Yes, that is a pretty hard problem, i.e. how do you distinguish between JavaScript highlighting a source snippet and doing something that messes up your presentation? In the end, I don't think this would be worth the effort. Keep the feed reader simple enough, the real post is usually just a keypress away. My usage pattern in Google Reader is just pressing "v" to open a tab with that post for later referral (it's easy enough to modify firefox or chrome to do that in the background).

Of course, if you have total control over your RSS generation and feel particularly perfectionist, you could always have some minimalistic features present in your feed, probably similar to your print CSS version. Bold and italic for syntax highlighting, for example.

This is the first I'm hearing of Newsblur. I've contemplated building something similar to try and tackle some of the issues I raised in my comment in this thread. Looks like you're well on your way. I hope you stick with it! I'd really like to more out of RSS.

Well, it's also entirely open-source, from the front-end to the distributed feed fetchers on the backend, as well as the iOS app: http://github.com/samuelclay

Interesting. These are the exact issues that I had. So I eagerly clicked over to your site. I clicked on a few things, and after 2 minutes I left. For good. Why?

No taste. Very little to no taste.

While you do exactly what I need, these are incredibly complicated times. And I want to be sure that you will solve my issues without introducing complicated buttons and concepts I have to learn first. Plus Icons that hurt my eyes. But that's exactly what you provided.

Would be great if you looked into this matter. Cause as of right now, 3 minutes after my visit, I'm still looking for a solution.

You only spent 2 minutes learning about a product that has many moving parts. I spend a lot of time working on the flow and design of NewsBlur. I think if you give it it's proper due, you'll find yourself astounded by all the attention to detail and features that you won't find in any other feed reader. It's pretty clear that NewsBlur goes well above and beyond.

Like they say, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Also, the complicated things that one sees at first sight are a sign that probably all features, including the ones that I didn't see, are complicated. Which is not what I'm looking for.

I'll second this after playing around just a tiny bit today. I wanted to train it that I really like the "Four Short Links" in O'Reilly Radar's feed. The problem is that the title looks like this: "Four Short Links: April 19, 2012".

Turns out, I can highlight the text that I "like" in the title of an article and "like" that (or "dislike it"). So I just highlighted the "Four Short Links" part and liked that. Bingo. Done. That is the kind of attention to detail and control that I want to have in a feed reader (assuming it can actually use all that data I'm going to give it, time will tell there).

Your "About NewsBlur" page has nice Who/How/Why sections, but I’m still not sure What NewsBlur is. I guess it is a feed reader and it looks nice, but what makes it different from the one I already have?

Why is it that NewsBlur premium subscribers have to find out about a private beta on HN?

That does not make me happy.

The new social features will. I've been posting about the beta on Twitter, and because the beta is still buggy as sin, I wanted only less invested users (like on a random tread) and highly invested users (twitter followers) to be the catalyst for fixing bugs. I'm planning to email all premiums early next week.

But no worries, the betas been live for only a few days. Right now, you're only missing broken unread counts and broken Facebook connect. Be glad you're coming in a bit late.

This is the first I'm hearing of Newsblur. I've contemplated building something similar to try and tackle some of the issues I raised in my comment in this thread. Looks like you're well on your way.

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