Created my own RSS Reader Nuesbyte | Hacker News Reader

Created my own RSS Reader Nuesbyte

nuesbyte.com

50 points7hundredand7748 comments

I would love some feedback!

To have this said first: I really like your reader, it looks beautiful and so far it's the one that I'd most like to use.

In the wake of the Announcement of Google Reader shutting down, a lot of people are gonna be wary of jumping into another service that could go down any time.

What are your mid-/long-term plans for keeping this online? Will there be monetization through ads? Through a subscription? Or are you planning to open source it for self-hosting?

A last important question, can I export my data?

cheers hellerbarde

edit: updated question

This is a great comment. It really chews into some of the things I have been thinking about for the future. Right now I have decided to keep it a free services with no ads. Though as most sites, of course I would like to make money from it, which goes hand in hand with improving it continually. I have never thought of the idea of exporting data, however with the OO way I have created the database, I can definitely add this in. GReader imports are something I have to work on next. My focus for this start has been to keep it clean, simple and fast. Because of that I worked on the optimising code for weeks. (the server is based in Australia, thus, better hosting online will definitely speed it up).

To address your question better, the plan has now turned into creating a subscription services which will allow to setup better services whilst keeping traffic standardised to a medium that allows us to grow the server farm as more people join. Development is underway to turn it into a fully scalable system for future growth, whilst continually adding features etc.

I would love to hear what people think of it. I plan on doing a few updates, including adding a mobile version and adding Google Reader import ability.

What is your crawler backend? Superfeedr? Home made?

Home made

Do you need any help with this project, specifically with the backend and scaling? My email is in my profile if so.

I'd love to see a compact list view. This really is what I look for in any RSS client.

That I can add with other personalisation features!

mobile version would be great

To be added after Google Reader Imports.

Wow, I'm really enjoying using this, slick looking too. I really like all the little touches you've added, the UX is great. I think you've come the closest yet to the simplicity that google reader offered. I would try as hard as possible to maintain the feeling of simplicity in your design even when adding more features.

A few feature requests, feed importing, profile editing and a larger feed view (maybe collapse the sidebars?) also folders to be able to sort feeds you've added and the respective views.

edit: updated some things

Thanks for the feedback, those are certainly on my list. I have only finished the most basics! Next is adding all these features :)

The feeds are also a folder you can put more feeds into, rename, etc. Unless you refer to folders inside folders?

Ah ok, I see now. I think that interaction could be a bit more clear. I would be nice to be able to drag and drop the feeds in and out of the site groups, as well as expand/collapse the groups on the "News" page.

Also, when I added a feed, it wasn't immediately clear that I was making a folder because it grabs the name of the feed, I thought I had just added a standalone feed to my general list.

I understand. I like the drag and drop idea. Its clean and simple. Ill see what I can do about making the folder more clear by changing the icon of the new 'group' to look like a folder!

> the UX is great.

The UX is indeed very nice. Just a small issue: FF19 on OSX 10.8.3 displays a horizontal scrollbar. Looks like a margin or padding problem with the central feed element.

Same problem on Windows 7

This looks really promising, actually signed up which is saying something because I've always leaned towards just using actual websites despite having built a few mobile RSS readers myself.

I am a bit confused with some UI elements though (perhaps because I wasn't a heavy Google Reader user):

1) Subscriptions are for grouping feeds ya? I see how I can create a new subscription and name it, but I'm totally failing on how to add a feed to it. If you go to the RSS page I see things I want to add, but no plus button or other interaction seems to do what I expect. Am I just confused?

2) Not sure if this is a setting somewhere, but having full articles open in a new tab would be nice.

3) Is there a way to set all the items in a single subscription as read?

4) What is the column on the right? Popular items? Some label there might be good.

Overall super cool, I like it! Keep it up man. If you continue developing it, consider a Bitcoin tip jar, I'd throw some your way.

Ah. You createa group and click on it (its highlighted) and then you move to the right side, and click on the feeds you want, you can use the input to search for feeds, or, put the feed directly into the input box.

The column on the right its popular views in your feed selection. The 'views' should hopefully outline this fact. I agree I have to setup a better method (or instructions) on how to add feeds to a group

Ah, ok.. Ya I think I was clicking on the link title before perhaps? I see it works if I click on the box instead. Just having a + button there would do worlds to explain that process I think.

Thanks.

The design is great but it's really slow. Which I'll forgive because it's new, and this post is probably giving you new traffic, but to be a replacement for GReader, I want it to be as close to instantaneous as possible.

This is also why I don't use Feedly. It's slow!

Definitely due to too much traffic, its just a cheap shared hosting site in Australia. I will definitely have to bump it up.

I'm getting:

  Resource Limit Is Reached
  The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded 
  resource limit. Please try again later

From click to click.

You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ') AND date > NOW() - INTERVAL 1 WEEK ORDER BY views DESC LIMIT 0 , 10' at line 1

Ill have to check the manual!

I like it so far. I would encourage you to keep improving it, because as things stand now you're at the top of my list of GReader replacements. I like that Nuesbyte is in the browser and doesn't require a client. Importing my feeds from GReader will be great. Also on my wishlist: vi-style movement keys (j,k,l) &c. Thanks!

Its funny that deleting all the RSS feeds - will result in the MYSQL Error... Look into it developer...

Thats for the exact info, I have since updated it!

Sounds to me like insufficiently intelligent IN clause generation - a mistake I've made at least once and seen many more times.

I'm guessing english isn't your first language from the way you misconjugated the "will result" part but "look into it developer" comes across as "you suck and I am laughing at you" whereas for an early stage service I think "here's a bug report" is rather more appropriate.

Looks promising, but I clicked on a story and got a mysql error. Do you have pubsubhubbub support? That's the first thing[0] I look for in a feed reader.

[0]http://lee-phillips.org/newsblurred/

I haven't heard of it, I will look into adding it.

In terms of mysql error, the site is getting way more traffic than my simple hosting provider can provide. I will need to bumb it up.

Currently it's returning this:

> Resource Limit Is Reached

> The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.

Nuesbyte is definitely one of the better Google reader alternatives out there. Love the layout and simplicity. Added to my list - http://ginicharts.com/google-reader-alternatives

Awesome, Would you ever go into detail why you did it ? I wrote a personal app over year ago called DashBored (I suspected this was gonna happen when the big CO's were all about API restrictions).

Thanks,

Sure. I have been musing over building a website for a long time. I knew that to build something new was difficult. So I wanted to build something cleaner, faster and simpler than other people. News is the number one thing that people often seek on the internet, and thus, that is the path I went down. Originally, it was just a site that I created as a hobby for myself to view, but as i progressed, quite a few people liked it, and then Google Reader died, and I thought, this would be a good opportunity.

Looks promising, but I only get to use it for a minute, then I started getting 508 errors. If it gets more stable and faster, I may consider switching to this from the Old Reader.

I saw this before (you posted it on some blog or something), and I really liked the design. I really hope you are able to scale it up for public use!

You need to add top:0; left:0 on your fixed topbar for android browser - good job btw

Thanks ill add that in!

super slick. Are there any keyboard shortcuts though? I need my 'n' key

yes

very slick, any framework used for developing the application ?

j/k navigation?

no https?

Is it something people want?

not me.

Definitely because you can sign up and login. For anonymous reading less so.

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