Hacker News Reader

Comment by rachelbythebay | Hacker News Reader

Not many people seem that interested in my approach to solving the feed reading problem. I run my own backend and frontend and just let it fetch things for me. Then I periodically check in and flip through to see what's new. If I wind up on some new platform on which the web frontend doesn't make sense, I'll write a native one which speaks the same simple "POST in, AJAX out" language. No big thing.

I set up a Kickstarter to turn it into open source and release everything I've written and then some, but it seems the momentum just isn't there yet.

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Have you heard of Newsblur? Sounds exactly like what you're describing.

API: http://www.newsblur.com/api

Open Source: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

Also, cheers for not including a link to your Kickstarter.

I saw Newsblur quite some time back, maybe in 2011 when I decided to move myself off Reader. It didn't look like anything I wanted: so many frames!

Reader itself had a whole bunch of stuff which got in the way. One time I tried mocking it up with most of that stuff gone and I liked what I found. That's the sort of ideal I went for with my own thing: enough of a bar so people know it's a feed reader and not some scuzzy content thievery site (since they arrive when they see it in their referrer logs), and a way to flip through the posts.

The Kickstarter was an attempt to try something really "out there" for me and see if it would work. It looks like it will not.

The nice thing about NewsBlur is that it exposes the API so that, if you want, you can make a completely new front end for it. This is what I did: http://www.altfeedreader.com/

Hit shift+E then shift+F. That opens "Everything" which is the river of news, then fullscreens it so it's a single framed river of news.

NewsBlur is also YC S12. I can't say I've tried them all to compare fairly, but I'm quite pleased with NewsBlur for my feed-reading needs. Samuel Clay has been quite responsive to the few GitHub issues I've filed, too.

From her profile http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2000892040/fred-feed-rea...

Yep - I have the same approach. My subscriptions generate 5-10 posts a day, I look at them once in the afternoon, mark all as read and move on.

Open sourced mine here: https://github.com/swanson/stringer - it's <10 minutes to deploy an instance to Heroku and be on your way. All the data is in your own database - do whatever the hell you want with it.

I've been looking for something like this. Thanks for sharing!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2000892040/fred-feed-rea...

I can't imagine there'd be much interest in so such a thing just to read blogs.

It probably goes without saying that, perhaps despite appearances, Kickstarter projects require a massive amount of marketing to have any hope of success.

> I set up a Kickstarter to turn it into open source and release everything I've written and then some

You could also, you know, just release what you have as open source without asking people to pay $30,000 for the privilege?

It's not that simple.

I'm curious but helpless, what's it called so I can learn more?

BTW, OT but what do you think of Larry, Sergey, and Eric?

I never met any of them. I doubt they'd know me if they saw me.

You can't send an email?

I did (via the contact form), but no response was received.

You'll have to let me know how getting ignored in two different mediums feels.

Protip? Getting people to talk to you is another form of sales.

Also, don't ask questions in public for which the answers that could cause them to get blacklisted in their field of choice. That's a pretty good way not to get an answer.

Rachel tends to be a drive-by participant in this community. Look at the comment/post history and the profile which is exceedingly well tuned.

Lastly, why do you care what IT people that used to work for Google think of the Triumvirate?

Thank you for responding to the central point and not attacking the author's identity.

It wasn't about you at all, but your consistency is well noted.

I was trying to figure out what went wrong at Google.

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