Show HN: Litenin – A light and fast feed reader | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Litenin – A light and fast feed reader

liten.in

16 pointsbearfrieze15 comments

Are you up for some constructive criticism?

Something I noticed right off the bat: managing your rss feeds doesn't show you the whole URL you subscribed to. This is a problem for anyone who subscribes both to the posts and comments sections of blogspot blogs. After it makes contact with the site and pulls down the site name, you still have the same problem; both entries have the same name and you have no way of knowing which is which.

Maybe you should allow for somebody to click on the feed and be able to see and edit both the url and the site name?

Ok, it's fetched all my feeds now. All it shows is the title and the feed it's from. I love the simplicity of the list, but I need to be able to click on it and see the content inline. Maybe also have a "view all" button that expands everything for quick viewing?

I agree, it is confusing not being able to differentiate between feeds with identical titles. I hadn't thought of this problem myself since I didn't encounter it.

With regards to the amount of information displayed, the initial idea was not to have any content/previews inside the reader, and just offer a list of titles that link to the actual content. Previews is a popular request, and I will definitely consider adding some text-only previews to start out with. I like the idea of the "view all" button.

Thanks for your feedback, much appreciated.

Update: I have implemented teaser texts. I will push it to production in ~24 hours. Right now there are very few teaser texts in the database, but in 24 hours Nimbus (the back-end for Litenin) will have updated all feeds at least once. Thanks once again.

Really awesome.

No register, no account, no login? That is the best thing of the internet.

Here's a bug with the timestamp: http://i.imgur.com/NiI6yF5.png

Thank you for the kind words and the bug report.

I tracked down the feed in the database, and it seems like Nimbus (the back-end for Litenin) read the published date correctly. The item was published ahead of time (it's 21:29 UTC time right now): http://feed.dilbert.com/dilbert/daily_strip

Any suggestions on how to handle this in a more graceful way?

What if, for every date in the future, you showed a message saying "published in the future" instead of the date?

Thanks for the suggestion. I have added it to the issue on Github: https://github.com/bearfrieze/litenin/issues/10. Will look into it.

That's what I like about it too. All they way down to the black/white design.

You don't see things as extreme as this everyday. Even with the focus of late on simplicity and flatness.

To be honest, it does not seem shockingly fast:

My browser console shows a last byte sent, first byte received delta of 18 to 48 ms. It's swift, certainly not shocking.

I don't want to sound cynical, it is a good work and works well all considered.

First and foremost, "light" and "shocking" are references to the word which Litenin imitates: Lightning. I see a mysterious moderator has changed the title – I do not mind, but find it pretty curious.

When I started building Litenin I often found myself waiting several seconds for Feedly to load. My colleagues at work had desktop readers that were equally sluggish. In that perspective it seems rather fast.

I find that Feedly has improved significantly recently. I just loaded my feeds in ~1 second which isn't terrible considering it has a wealth of features that Litenin lacks.

I like it. Not perfect but minimalist as hell and indeed, very fast. Nice one.

I really like the black and white design, is there a CSS framework or template for this?

Not knowing which feed each heading is from is painful.

That sounds very painful indeed. This is unintended – the title of the feed should be displayed to the left of the items title like this: http://i.imgur.com/iqD1f0J.png. Would it be possible for you to attach a screenshot and/or a link to the relevant feed(s)?

Good but I want to "see more" button :)

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