Show HN: my personal news reader, now public - SkimFeed.com | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: my personal news reader, now public - SkimFeed.com

skimfeed.com

108 pointsbrador78 comments

I love the comment in the top of your source:

You have a few escaping issues, that Firefox nicely hi-lights if you view the source. For example, if the title of an article contains a ", you don't quote it, so in the html you end up with attributes like this:

  title="something "something else""

You also don't escape ampersands. Eg:

  <a href="http://example.com/foo?x=1&y=2">x & y</a>

Should be:

  <a href="http://example.com/foo?x=1&amp;y=2">x &amp; y</a>

I imagine there is a more general issue with a lack of escaping, but these are just a couple of examples I found.

I saw these issues last night but couldn't work out what was causing them. Thanks for the explanations Mike, added to todo.

Update: Fixed. I think, but those & are still showing up red in source.

Backstory: I built this last year and forgot all about it. Re-discovered it on my junk server last month and I've been using it ever since.

Polished overnight and now released to the lions den.

Take a look, feedback welcome. What do you think?

+1, good sir. Thank you for releasing this out in the wild!

Looks nice! Somehow we've been thinking about similar things — https://www.sharingstate.com/office/News

I like it. May I suggest getting rid of the fixed social sharing buttons? The ones at the bottom do the job well enough. I find the top ones a little bit distracting. Good font choice.

I really like this, it makes skimming the major news sites very easy. It looks like a quick way to view the news in the morning. I could probably scan all those and open the ones I want to read in under a minute. The only thing I would change is the social buttons at the top but from the other comments I can see you're going to remove them.

Nice work.

I used jimmyr.com all these years. Might as well switch to this. Hate those fixed social buttons though.

The fixed socials are only on for today, I've made a note to remove them.

Good to have you on board, Let me know if there's any feeds you'd like added.

I absolutely love this - now my new homepage. This is a very pleasant way to present this to my eyes. Even more importantly, it loads 'instantly', which is extremely important for a go-to/default site. In my opinion, drudgereport's popularity owes a lot to this combination of easy to absorb and quick loading times.

If I could make a suggestion - I would be interested in seeing a list of popularity based on clicks/time. To preserve the layout, you could only load it as a side column if the screen was wide enough to display more than 3 columns.

I actually think a site like this could turn into a one-man cash cow if you can get it to be a default site visited multiple times each day.

Great tool, I'd maybe change font and line-height to make for easier reading -> http://i.imgur.com/7PSvi.png

Nice work and thanks for sharing.

If you can add hyperlinks to each title, it will be helpful (e.g clicking on "Make" should take me to make.com).

It's like http://www.popurls.com: really good aggregator.

This is pretty good. Currently I use NetVibes, which is buggy and actually TOO customizable. I like the strict grid layout.

If you made this a service, here's what would make me switch:

- customizable feeds (kind of obvious I guess)

- ability to mark items as read/unread (link color is not enough - I want to skip some items, or just read them all from the blog itself without clicking individual items)

- have individual feed header be a link to the feed's main page (it's the <link> element in RSS) - customize number of items per feed (e.g. I'd want more items for feeds which update frequently)

Nice to haves:

- tabs (I have LOTS of feeds - would be easier to manage instead of long scrolling)

- along with using the <link> element above, ability to override this, because I've noticed lots of feeds that don't set it properly (link to the domain root instead of the blog root, e.g.)

I currently use netvibes too. to customize rss feeds.. i use Yahoo Pipes. You can provide bunch of feeds to pipes, then add custom filters, sorts, terms and generate a custom RSS address. Add this address to netvibes.

and with this process, you will hardly ever visit any of the homepages except netvibes.

Nice project though.

Thanks for the list. I have an organized list here, at http://talll.com. I have tried to place the reading list under various groups - I thought this might be relevant to this discussion.

Although I like the idea, I personally prefer Pulse.me. It has pictures and resized articles according to their significance.

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/W1NKw.png

Pulse looks like a neat idea, but I can't stand the layout. Where should my eyes go?

I'm a big fan of "significance", "buzz", and "personalization" in theory, but I find it easier to skim some text myself.

Re: "Where should my eyes go?"

I find that I can skim more easily with a few images that provide additional visual cues other than those of textual information. Pictures require a different visual focus, and might allow me to focus on the "bigger picture" (e.g. whether it is coming from WSJ), or "smaller picture" (i.e. more specific examples).

Additionally, I like that you can mix the sources together, with not too much of anything; instead emphasising a more holistic view.

great point about the sources.

Yes, you can skim more easily with images, but those images are leading your eyes to what? The best articles or just a random article with images? I say it's the second one.

I'd argue title words are much better at showcasing an articles potential value than a stock image of a carrot.

My biggest gripe with Pulse and similar readers is that clicking on a headline takes me to an article stub with an option to click a link to the full article. Just take me to the article!

TheNextWeb appears twice on the page: first one after Mashable, and second after Geek. But, only the first four items are same in both lists. Fetched from different feed URLs?

Others have already said it, but I will say it again. Please remove the share buttons on top. On my phone (Firefox Mobile on G2), the share buttons keep scrolling down along with the content. In addition to taking up valuable screen space, it is quite annoying as it is quite jumpy and hides the actual content.

Cool stuff!

I like brief little news feeds like this. They get to the point, there's not clutter with distracting pictures, etc. It's simple and all that's necessary.

On my computers I have Rainmeter installed and I link some general Google news feeds right onto my desktop: http://i.imgur.com/76Oc8.png . I wish I had more space though in my upper-right corner, could show more full headlines. A dual-monitor setup would probably be best...

This project is the opposite of this project: http://www.frequency-decoder.com/demo/slabText/

Excellent design. Within 5 seconds of visiting your site, I understood what it does and how it would be useful to me, and bookmarked it.

May i suggest line-height: 160%

I know it will take away a few links from the viewarea but you will be able to read them faster IMHO.

Yes, this ^ please!

Perhaps a toggle of some sort?

How did you come to the 160% figure? Golden triangle?

Experience :)

Done.

Golden triangle is nonsense for design, by the way. Please don't let it inform your decisions. Most examples of it in nature are bogus.

Absolutely love it. Thanks for the share.

I think it would be worth adding some way to filter/hide the sources. I like the idea of the whole thing, especially the simplicity, but I don't read nearly as many news sources as you, so it makes it kind of inconvenient to scroll/search through the whole thing to find the sites I am looking for

It's neat, but I find things more useful when they're not separated by source/author, but in how interesting I'll find them. I don't read an Ars Technica article just because it's from ars.

To me it would be much better to get rid of the origin altogether to help eliminate bias and focus on the actual story.

Look at BBC's headlines compared to everyone else's. Someone explain this to me.

My 2 guesses: SEO or that little sidebar box they have showing popular articles has a character limit to look good.

Very nice collection. Few sites I never heard of. Thanks for sharing. Btw, You Mentioned Amazon and Google Ad-sense in Privacy policy. I don't see any Ads, have any plan to keep Ads on this site and make revenue?

Ads depends on the hosting bill, but I like the clean interface so we'll see how it goes.

The privacy policy is a copy, paste, find, replace from another site I run, didn't expect this heat. Added to todo.

I love this. The only thing I might like as an addition would be the ability to reorganize and change the font. No login / account nonsense just save my ordering and font choice in a cookie or something.

Reorganizing would be a tough cookie...but changing the font is possible.

Any particular fonts in mind?

I had a secondary thought. Does this page auto refresh? Can I just leave it open on a separate virtual desktop... or do I need to refresh it?

Does not auto-refresh right now. Reasoning: I wouldn't want to see a title, then see it vanish before I get to click it.

Potential solution for V2: Toggle switch.

I'm not familiar with the HN RSS. Is there a reason this doesn't match what I see on the front page?

It's not an official source for the HN feed, hence, I do believe it is delayed since those links appear to be from a few hours ago. If I ever find a better source or if anyone mentions one here I'll update. It can only get better.

Thanks for making me chuckle with the comments at the top of the source.

The more time I spend consuming, the less time I spend producing. And this is an online content firehose. It looks very nice and tempting, but thanks, but no, thanks.

I say you need a mix of both. Abstinence is not the answer.

I agree with you: 90% of the value of a developer is knowing what to type, which includes what NOT to type. Knowing the difference comes (IMHO) from being aware of what is out there and stories learned from the experience of others.

So yes: perhaps less cat videos is a good thing, but less exposure to information is not.

There was another news reader on HN recently, but this one is much better on the iPhone (where I seem to be doing much of my reading lately).

I'll be using this page from now on. Nice work.

For whatever reason I can't CMD-Click an article without being taken straight to it. I normally like to open a load of links in the background then read them one by one.

They're all set to target _blank...could that be affecting your CMD-clicking?

It's more a case of them being set to _BLANK instead of _blank. If I edit the src to be the correct lowercase version, CMD-Clicking works as it should.

This is an issue for me as well. Ideally, I'd like to be able to command-click five or ten articles, then get through them one by one, rather than having to return to SkimLinks after I read each one.

Looks like this has been fixed. Thanks :)

Yep, fixed! And the social buttons no longer hover.

What do you think of the line-height @ 160%? too much?

Great collection of sources, but please, mark :visited links!

This is cool. Can you make the HN links point to the HN pages? Besides getting easy access to the discussion, it sorta de-dupes the links.

Nice Work! I'm going to use this. If you want to make my OCD bookmarks bar perfect, can you add a favicon?

I cannot believe I forgot to make a favicon! ha. Added to todo list.

This reminds me a lot of Alltop.com - I believe you can create your own custom page there as well.

That is a really huge list.

I know right, yet the site still weighs in at just 46.29kb thanks to the wonders of gzip compression (156kb without).

Any ideas on feeds worth adding?

The Verge

Yeah, weird thing about the verge, they use "entry" instead of "item" in their feed so it breaks. Anyone know why they do this?

The Next Web

This is very useful. Thank you for sharing this.

What are your plans for this?

The Next Web added, should show on the next db refresh.

Plans is an interesting question, thanks for asking.

When I built it originally I had this huge project in mind (as we all do :) ), bookmarks, saved articles in a user area, FB login, link tracking for a "most popular links box", live stream, recommendation algos, the works.

I guess this scale is one of the reasons I originally dropped it.

After the rediscovery I thought "let's go MVP on this". So I cut everything back. What you see is what surivived. Literally, just the news links, on a html page, that is quick to load with no server hit.

Future plans - let's see how it goes eh. If the hosting bill enters the trips I'll drop a few ads in, but I like the cleanness of it all for now.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Have you considered putting in a donation button as well?

I've not tried it yet but hopefully this also works on mobile phones (I have a Blackberry specifically)

Have you considered releasing the source code?

Any chance you could just store the images in a single local image and use CSS sprites, instead of loading favicons from every different site. The front page does 62 HTTP requests and they're all over the place...

I could do, but the way it's built is using a master array in the page creator file. To add a feed, I just add the new feed and favicon location into the array. Storing the images would mean more work each time a new feed is added.

Having said that, CSS Sprites is something I don't know much about and will be looking into.

It'd take a tiny bit more work on the frontend, but instead of saving the favicon location, you could save a data-uri of the favicon image. That would then completely eliminate all of the external HTTP requests.