Text-only NPR | Hacker News Reader

Text-only NPR

thin.npr.org

96 pointspzaich33 comments

Seriously, I wish ever content heavy site would have a version like this. Works so well on the phone.

Yeah I love this too.

Isn't this what the mobile reader on iOS is for?

That works excellent for individual pages and articles. But you have to get to them via the information and graphics heavy site, because for extracting the most important navigational components the mobile reader will not work very well.

+1. I wish every site was designed first like this, then enhanced with CSS, then enhanced with JS. That is called progressive fallback, where CSS/JS is used for the enhancement of content, not the element of the content.

I wish you were designing all the Web sites.

Would the user be able to switch off the CSS/JS at will irrespective of the capabilities of their http client?

Agreed. However, I learned it as "progressive enhancement".

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

It also works well on a desktop.

I suspect corporate news orgs don't support text-only versions of their site due to a lack of display ads. I think BBC has one, but every time I go to it on a mobile device, I am redirected to the media-heavy mobile site.

At least a few years ago, there was still gopher up at NPR. The sysadmin whose personal passion that was left, though; I'm not sure if it was maintained after that.

When you strip away all of the graphics you realize that some news articles are thin on content (only 1 or 2 paragraphs). Maybe the links I looked at were photo galleries. Fun to look through the site and not be distracted.

Keep in mind that it's radio, so a lot of their content is produced as audio first, and transcribed/summarized later, so if you're looking at content from the news magazine show airing now, it might be a bit light. Compare http://thin.npr.org/s.php?sId=409088251&rid=2 from today, which currently (~8pm EDT) stands at one paragraph, to http://thin.npr.org/s.php?sId=408010714&rId=2&x=1 from a few days ago, which is more like 15-ish paragraphs, despite both being of about the same audio duration.

Actually, much of it's first written, then read. Live interviews excepted.

But correspondents' reports: much is written.

True. Usually the scripts aren't the same text as the articles, though. New copy is written for the web, later.

Every "article" I've looked at on this site is just a blurb for the full story, the same blurb that's under the audio player on the full site.

Yay NPR!! I love this, the site loads in milliseconds. I'm pledging my local station again because of this!

I remember when almost all websites looked like this.

Refreshing.

Maybe it's time to reconsider default browser rendering to add the tiny bit of style that this might benefit from.

Seeing this really solidifies my advocacy for modern web technologies (including JS & CSS). In no way would I prefer to use this than the main NPR site.

The entire point of CSS was to separate presentation from content. There is no reason why we can't all be happy, except for a misunderstanding of the correct way to use certain tools.

Notice that, no matter how nice a site looks, somebody will be on a weird device or will have some disability which will render the minimalistic version much preferable.

People tend to think these are unusual cases, not worth optimizing for. More cynically, they are not affected by them so they don't care. These people lack imagination. The weird device can be a future device trying to access old content. The disability could be a natural consequence of growing old enough.

A 5 minute interview [1] is only 845 bytes. This is brilliant.

EDIT: I was wrong, it's not actually the whole file, just a pointer to the online resource. http://file.org/extension/wax

[1] http://thin.npr.org/s.php?sId=408987225&rid=7

I was disappointed; I thought they had a site that had transcripts of all the audio.

Audio and video simply don't work for me; I can read so much faster than I can listen, and I can skip back and forth trivially by moving my eyes, rather than scrubbing.

I know that's not for everyone, but that's me.

The question I have is: why does it take 2075ms to load for me? I have 30mbit cable...

3933ms here. Wow. Simply wow!

Still requires a database call for the content and these pages are unlikely to be cached. If I had to guess, NPR isn't using their made collection of servers, probably just a single server.

Because Thin probably gets no love, is not properly cached or maintained. It's a miracle it still works.

www.npr.org: 0.099sec thin.npr.org: 2.199sec

If you are on a *nix machine you can probably use Links2 to get the best of both worlds, fast loading and rendering of text with embedded graphics. I wonder if anyone has tried porting Links or Links2 to Android?

So progressive as usual! I wish more sites would do this, but too many self important designers convince other people of their importance.

Refreshing.

Is it time to reconsider default browser rendering to add the tiny bit of style that this might benefit from?

This is a great example of Adaptive Content. This should be accessible on almost any device anywhere.

Awesome, but they forgot to do text only 404 pages. Quick fix though.

This is the new "Instant Articles".

Looks pretty well on Kindle! :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com