Show HN: Yoleo – A Beautiful RSS Reader
yoleoreader.com
yoleoreader.com
I wanted to offer the service to people that might not be able to afford it, and not have them punished by having fewer features.
That's neat, why don't consider some kind of sponsorship program? A user that can pay, can sponsor one or two more users who can't, that would be nice :)
I don't want to differentiate people who can't pay.
Sorry, blacked out for a minute there.
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("news.ycombinator.com") {
body > center > table {max-width: 960px;}
.default {padding-right: 22px;}
textarea {width: 100%;}
form {padding-right: 18px;}
}
= less eye strain[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100460 [2] http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html
The problem with these kind of services is that if they are free, a lot of people won't pay for them and might use so many resources that the money paid by the few people who donated or paid will not be enough to sustain the service.
Sorry for the tone, but I am so tired of seeing lots of mini-web services turned off because they were free... Nowadays I downloaded Vizzy for Mac: although it is not the most pretty RSS reader, I know it will be working forever.
Edit: also, in this instance, a good chunk of the beautiful design seems to have been lifted from Google's style, from the icon style to the way they put a little red bar next to the current selection
Also, sometimes design is a focal point. All things being equal, I will choose the prettier option. I might even be persuaded to pay money for a prettier option if it functions just as well as the ugly open source option.
The time and effort that goes into making something simple and easy is enormous. Very nice product!
A few things:
* Is there a way to scroll through all items in the same way that Google Reader does, rather than having to go to the next item by clicking (or hitting "j")? Feeds with lots of images suffer from the current approach, since there's a delay when each item is loaded (preloading them, say, five items in advance works well).
* Hitting keyboard controls like "j" when Firefox's "search when you start typing" is turned on doesn't work. I think you need to return false in the keypress event handler (or whichever one it is).
* I would suggest changing the body font to black with a weight of 400. I have Source Sans Pro installed, and at 300 #606060 it's too light (in both senses of the word). It looks nice enough, but the main purpose of this is for reading, so using the most legible font possible should be a priority. (Tip: 15px Arial looks a lot nicer than 16px, IMHO. It's what I was using when I made 90% of a feed reader.)
Love it though! Will definitely use :)
1) URLs that should work with autodiscovery give me this message -> "Sorry, that does not look like a valid URL".
2) When I enter the full URL of the feed it appears to add the subscription successfully, but it doesn't show up when I refresh my screen.
3) The keyboard navigation is a bit weird. If "J" advances to the next item, should the previous letter "H" send me to the previous item (as opposed to "K")?
4) I don't see how I can manually create folders for my subscriptions.
5) I can't rename subscription titles.
Yoleo looks promising, but it feels like a beta product.
No. It inherits this behavior from Google Reader, which inherits this from vi. http://www.catonmat.net/blog/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys...
One of the things a liked about Reader was that I could get a very simple, compact, list of feed headlines, making it easy to scan through a large number of items to pick out the few that might be of interest. A good RSS read helps me get through a lot of data without having to step through every item or go through pages with only a handful of items showing on each.
I did not see a way to get such a layout in Yoleo. Are simple, compact title list views possible, or planned?
Props on the work you've done, though.
Also, are there any plans for mobile apps? If yes, please tell me that you're going to charge for them.
- Please add folder support.
- I'm sure the text look beautiful on Macs, but it's not easy to read my feeds with that grey-ish text on Windows. Can't you make the text a bit bolder or darker?
- It's obvious you spend a lot of time working on this so I'd hate to see it closing because you couldn't afford to pay for your servers. I don't think asking for a donation is a good idea. Make it something like a $1-2/monthly subscription with a full month free trial. That way you may lose some customers, but your servers wouldn't be as busy as it appears to be now and you'd have a -sorta- fixed income and wouldn't worry about the future.
- An instapaper support would be great.
- I agree with other people here. That red looks beautiful but it's distracting when you're reading. Maybe tone it down a bit, or let us choose the color/background etc? Tha'd be a killer feature.
Best of luck!
Otherwise, happy to import from Reader and check this out. I like that it feels light and easy to use.
This may be the first real Google Reader alternative I've seen so far.
Uncaught TypeError: Object sufio._xdWatchInFlight(); has no method 'apply' reader-29b4dd587f1ca6b5f0d639aac64ce9bf.js:1 e.(anonymous function) reader-29b4dd587f1ca6b5f0d639aac64ce9bf.js:1
Pretty print the error location from chrome: e.setInterval = function() {
var e = t.call(arguments, 0), n = e[0];
return e[0] = function() {
try {
n.apply(this, arguments)
Uncaught TypeError: Object sufio._xdWatchInFlight(); has no method 'apply' (repeated 1589 times)
} catch (e) {
throw TraceKit.report(e), e
}
}, r.apply(this, e)
}
The proxy at my work doesn't allow web sockets, and I think this might be related.Also, I noticed that there are at least 3 different third party services being called (superfish, pusherapp and intercom). All of these are ancillary to the main functionality, right?
I haven't even got my feeds imported yet, and the app is already pulling down 2 MB. superfish in particular is super heavy. I think I would prefer a lighter payload.
I removed the extension and the payload is more like 1MB. Still seems hefty but not as much of a concern to me.
I also noticed that content wasn't gzipped. should be a simple matter to add that to nginx.
Seriously, I admire your willingness to give something great away for free, but I also think you need to think about recouping your expenses and making your service financially sustainable for the long haul.
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-...
The host is our own patio11 here at HN.
Unrelated: I'd really be interested in a follow-up story/post from you about the load you're experiencing. You just pushed a free [1] service in front of HN. How's the thing holding up? Both code/stack and allocated hardware? I guess it boils down to general curiosity on the one hand, the question of whether you can do this in a sustainable fashion on the other hand.
1: with donations
That said, I hope you this gets traction. We need more options.
Yoleo is a self funded project. I would like to keep it that way if I can. That's why donations are very welcome. I do however offer Yoleo up for free for those who are unable to pay. Yoleo is written in Ember, and is backed by Rails.
I'm really into Ember, and helped out out by teaching a portion of the most recent Embergarten (http://unspace.ca/embergarten/) here in Toronto.
The import is a simple one click import, I've directly integrated with Googles Reader API.
You should use it....because it's good?
Hope that helps!
I have something in mind for this, but haven't gotten around to implementing it yet. Full SSL is coming.
There's also a Go (golang) port:
https://github.com/cactus/go-camo
I'm currently using go-camo in my own feed reader and have experienced some flakiness (images fail to load sometimes).
(Also, nice work!)
I thought Stripe blocked that specifically.
* Option to hide any unread feeds on sidebar (totally essential for me) * Unread count on feeds with new items * Ability to edit and rename folders
If any of these are there already.. I can't find em. Thanks for this great-working and great-looking site though!
This isn't specific to Yoleo; nobody seems to be implementing this, and it doesn't show up on the comparison summaries that pop up here on HN from time to time. There's no way all the current contenders are going to last; why isn't everyone jittery?
Just 2 feature requests:
1.) Let us change the one color :) That red is pretty, but distracts from the content. Dustin Curtis got this right on his minimalist design in that the one-color isn't used in the actual content.
2.) Responsive design: Iv'e been removing apps from my phone for weeks and I couldn't be happier. Far less annoying update badges. Also, as something that is open all the time it would be great to keep it in a smaller window than the current design allows.
Great work!
I always think a straight forward headline/copy relationship should be achievable with spacing, and maybe font-size before adding bold or a color.
If it's still too much (remember, this is an every day kind of app!) maybe the active links on the right could go non-red, then if it's still too much the border-left on the active links on the right.
Again, grats on shipping something that looks good.
Update: I am trying it out right now and I've noticed it's taking quite a long time to load my Google Reader profile. My Reader profile is absolutely enormous - hundreds of blogs and thousands upon thousands of read and unread posts. It took about 10 minutes to load a single blog. This is going to take a while.
This looks great, gonna give it a try. It's simple, and that's harder to do well.
The information density is WAY too low.
It would take me forever to browse through my feeds using your interface.
The reason why I like (and still use) Google Reader is because it packs the most number of posts of any RSS reader on a single page and makes it easy to scroll for more.
Google Reader is "glancable". Yoleo is not.
Otherwise Yoleo looks pretty ok. Design is clear and the icons look good, and it's simple to use.
However, the "glancability" issue completely kills it for me.
Good luck with it!
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=fb09cb3a62553d0f06...
It is the most simple of my yahoo pipes rss feeds (I use pipes a heap), it just kicks out the current #1 here on hackernews.
I've never had any problems putting my pipes feeds into other rss readers.
Yep, just tested and that feed you mentioned can be added.
[1] http://web-wanderings.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-no-coding-requi...
Are you already using your own backend? It seems so, since it's showing me different articles and not sync read status from Google Reader (which seems to show new content sooner).
What's the meaning of the orange circle empty/filled?
also, i can't figure out how to add a new or existing feed to a folder. the tags i had from google reader are still there.
That said, sending unsolicited mails... you know the dilemma here.
Nice template, really good work!
- the red buttons sometimes gets broken for me on Chrome (27) - the text on them is either invisible (log in on the main page) or messed up (one letter over another)
- text is rendered poorly on Chrome and Opera, probably a fault of the browser+font combination, maybe you can try to experiment with different fonts
- did you think about something different than read/unread model? it was something that was irking me about Google Reader or now with Netvibes - the point of RSS reader is not to read it all, at least not when you have thousands of items to read
<a> -> enter url -> <enter> should be all that's needed to add a feed.
I don't see a way to arrange the folders though, which would be a big plus. If I can force an order through some naming convention that's OK too.
Are you hosting this yourself? Do you expect $9/year members to adequate cover the costs? I'd totally be willing to pay more if it means I don't have to suffer through another shutdown.