Hacker News Reader

Comment by robmcm | Hacker News Reader

I don't really want a reader, I want a service that syncs state accross readers, and aggregates my feeds into one feed for easy downloads by devices.

Google reader was perfect for that, and it was only on occasion that I used their web interface. Most of the time I was on my iPad/iPhone/Android (using Reeder/Byline/Flipboard and the official android client)

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You can do that with Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/). Here is an example with several pipes, and each pipe combines many RSS feeds into one (http://pipes.yahoo.com/talentintelligence). You can even then export the pipe as an RSS of its own.

That's one part, but it doesn't solve the central state control. Perhaps someone could extract the Google reader API and turn it into a standard for other products to implement?

Please, no. I'm using the the Google Reader API, and it is crappy, at best.

One of my biggest kvetches is that while I can rename feeds in the browser, the API exposes no way to get the name I give the feed, or to set it.

By rename feeds do you mean the title? For example, Craig Mod's feed (https://feedreader.co/feeds/http://craigmod.com/rss/) has a rather ungainly title ("...considering the future of ...") which would make sense to rename.

Yahoo Pipes is awesome, but I'm consistently amazed it hasn't been shut down. Because it's so awesome.

The guy who writes Byline (@phfish on twitter) is looking at http://www.feedly.com/ as a potential replacement backend.

Reeder supports FeedAFever mentioned in the article, so I think I'm going to try that.

Only on the phone. iPad and desktop versions do not.

Caveat: http://shauninman.com/archive/2013/03/14/fire

Exaclty, I've been a Google Reader "user" for years and I thin I've seen it's actual interface three times at most.

exactly. To all the people making new readers, this is what I want. I'll gladly pay for it.

It seems like the obvious thing to do is to create a standard, perhaps based on however Reader currently syncs, and then build against it. That way, people like me who aren't interested in e.g. "social" features or "sharing" could implement a simple backend, point our preferred clients at it, and call it a day. Let the client developers war it out over front-end features, and let clever people like the Newsblur fellow add cool new backend stuff.

Wishes, horses, riding beggars, &c.

Would https://feedreader.co/api fit the bill? I'm looking for feedback. Example of it being used: https://feedreader.co/arpith

Would Dropbox be a viable way to propagate an aggregated feed across devices ?

(Just thinking out loud)

If every app did automatic OPML import/export, sure. That would keep your list of subscriptions in sync.

I was thinking more of propagating the read state of the feeds.

Maybe just a script that can run occasionally and dump the new items as a single HTML page (plus another file with state info) into Dropbox.

No. Brent Simmons (author of NetNewsWire) wrote a post precisely about that 1.5 years ago

http://inessential.com/2011/10/25/why_just_store_the_app_dat...

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