Show HN: I took your advice and prldr is now a visual RSS reader

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646290

by japetheape • 16 years ago

15 8 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Last week I showed prldr.com, a small project I created during my weekends. The immediate thing I learned from the comments was that prldr had to be a RSS reader, which I already had in mind. So after another couple of days programming prldr.com is now a visual rss reader. You read the news by just opening the links from the RSS feeds, simple as that.

features for now: management of feeds, import OPML file, keyboard navigation, automatic feed fetching.

ps: I disabled preloading of tabs, because some browsers tend to crash when opening 30 iframes :P. Have to implement some stack mechanism to do this. Expect it online tomorrow. pps: Some bugs may exist. Still very alpha. Testing an idea right here.

japetheape4• 16 years ago

http://prldr.com

and a link to a demo: http://prldr.com/demo

bastijn2• 16 years ago

I have to say that the idea of prldr.com is very nice. Of course there are multiple RSS readers but I have not found any which preloaded my pages and had very basic, yet very functional, keyboard navigation + interface.

The simple left frame containing all my news items is clean with the color coding enabled, and browsing through with "j" and "k" is simple and fast.

That having said I do think this idea is very dependent upon the _preloading_, without it this is still a decent and useful idea but the preloading was the cherry on the cake.

Looking forward to see preloading back in and maybe some more work on the listing of available content in the left menu.

japetheape4• 16 years ago

youre right, prldr without the preloading isn't worthy the name ;-) Will be back in a day or so.

japetheape4• 16 years ago

ok it's back now!

m0nty• 16 years ago

This is very nice. Would help if you used colours on the buttons, moved the button at the top-left so it wasn't touching the edge of the window, stuff like that. Black everywhere is not the answer ;) But it's very usable and does what it's supposed to.

japetheape4• 16 years ago

did some minor polishing, removed the blacks :p.

thejash• 16 years ago

This does not seem very useful to me. I read my feeds by using Google Reader with Firefox, and middle-mouse clicking on any link that I want to actually read. By the time I've opened a few tabs this way, the first of them has loaded.

In fact, my tabs are even displayed along the left and grouped properly (using tabkit)

Why would I want to use prldr?

bastijn2• 16 years ago

In your case it might be less useful, though you are making a lot of extra actions (?). Sure, you might achieve the same doing it your way, but people tend to reduce the number of (redundant) steps.

Two big pro's for prldr for me are:

(1) As titles of posts do not always explain the content in a good way I do not know if I will read it, using preloaded rss (prldr) I can quickly open all items consecutively without moving my mouse, just pressing "j".

(2) When I find something interesting, or at least think it is, I can scroll in my item and still use "j" or "k" to jump to the next item when I decide the article is not what I expected / want at the moment.

Summarizing, prldr might not be the thing for you as it is now, but I think a lot of people are not using their (google) RSS Reader(s) in such an advanced way as you are.

Show HN: I took your advice and prldr is now a visual RSS reader

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