Show HN: my personal news reader, now public - SkimFeed.com

by brador • 14 years ago

108 78 14 years ago

brador20• 14 years ago

Backstory: I built this last year and forgot all about it. Re-discovered it on my junk server last month and I've been using it ever since.

Polished overnight and now released to the lions den.

Take a look, feedback welcome. What do you think?

brianfryer2• 14 years ago

+1, good sir. Thank you for releasing this out in the wild!

state• 14 years ago

Looks nice! Somehow we've been thinking about similar things — https://www.sharingstate.com/office/News

denzil_correa2• 14 years ago

That is a really huge list.

brador20• 14 years ago

I know right, yet the site still weighs in at just 46.29kb thanks to the wonders of gzip compression (156kb without).

Any ideas on feeds worth adding?

denzil_correa2• 14 years ago

The Verge

aj2• 14 years ago

The Next Web

This is very useful. Thank you for sharing this.

What are your plans for this?

mike-cardwell2• 14 years ago

Any chance you could just store the images in a single local image and use CSS sprites, instead of loading favicons from every different site. The front page does 62 HTTP requests and they're all over the place...

markkat• 14 years ago

http://hubski.com/rss

npguy• 14 years ago

Thanks for the list. I have an organized list here, at http://talll.com. I have tried to place the reading list under various groups - I thought this might be relevant to this discussion.

seshagiric• 14 years ago

Nice work and thanks for sharing.

If you can add hyperlinks to each title, it will be helpful (e.g clicking on "Make" should take me to make.com).

MatthewPhillips• 14 years ago

I like it. May I suggest getting rid of the fixed social sharing buttons? The ones at the bottom do the job well enough. I find the top ones a little bit distracting. Good font choice.

sa1f• 14 years ago

I used jimmyr.com all these years. Might as well switch to this. Hate those fixed social buttons though.

brador20• 14 years ago

The fixed socials are only on for today, I've made a note to remove them.

Good to have you on board, Let me know if there's any feeds you'd like added.

yogrish• 14 years ago

Very nice collection. Few sites I never heard of. Thanks for sharing. Btw, You Mentioned Amazon and Google Ad-sense in Privacy policy. I don't see any Ads, have any plan to keep Ads on this site and make revenue?

brador20• 14 years ago

Ads depends on the hosting bill, but I like the clean interface so we'll see how it goes.

The privacy policy is a copy, paste, find, replace from another site I run, didn't expect this heat. Added to todo.

mike-cardwell2• 14 years ago

You have a few escaping issues, that Firefox nicely hi-lights if you view the source. For example, if the title of an article contains a ", you don't quote it, so in the html you end up with attributes like this:

  title="something "something else""

You also don't escape ampersands. Eg:

  <a href="http://example.com/foo?x=1&y=2">x & y</a>

Should be:

  <a href="http://example.com/foo?x=1&amp;y=2">x &amp; y</a>

I imagine there is a more general issue with a lack of escaping, but these are just a couple of examples I found.

brador20• 14 years ago

I saw these issues last night but couldn't work out what was causing them. Thanks for the explanations Mike, added to todo.

Update: Fixed. I think, but those & are still showing up red in source.

autophil• 14 years ago

There was another news reader on HN recently, but this one is much better on the iPhone (where I seem to be doing much of my reading lately).

I'll be using this page from now on. Nice work.

brianritchie• 14 years ago

Absolutely love it. Thanks for the share.

jeffehobbs• 14 years ago

This project is the opposite of this project: http://www.frequency-decoder.com/demo/slabText/

SnaKeZ• 14 years ago

It's like http://www.popurls.com: really good aggregator.

krigath2• 14 years ago

Although I like the idea, I personally prefer Pulse.me. It has pictures and resized articles according to their significance.

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/W1NKw.png

jpwagner3• 14 years ago

Pulse looks like a neat idea, but I can't stand the layout. Where should my eyes go?

I'm a big fan of "significance", "buzz", and "personalization" in theory, but I find it easier to skim some text myself.

krigath2• 14 years ago

Re: "Where should my eyes go?"

I find that I can skim more easily with a few images that provide additional visual cues other than those of textual information. Pictures require a different visual focus, and might allow me to focus on the "bigger picture" (e.g. whether it is coming from WSJ), or "smaller picture" (i.e. more specific examples).

Additionally, I like that you can mix the sources together, with not too much of anything; instead emphasising a more holistic view.

christensen_emc• 14 years ago

My biggest gripe with Pulse and similar readers is that clicking on a headline takes me to an article stub with an option to click a link to the full article. Just take me to the article!

adamcollingburn• 14 years ago

Great tool, I'd maybe change font and line-height to make for easier reading -> http://i.imgur.com/7PSvi.png

k-mcgrady• 14 years ago

I really like this, it makes skimming the major news sites very easy. It looks like a quick way to view the news in the morning. I could probably scan all those and open the ones I want to read in under a minute. The only thing I would change is the social buttons at the top but from the other comments I can see you're going to remove them.

Nice work.

jpwagner3• 14 years ago

This is cool. Can you make the HN links point to the HN pages? Besides getting easy access to the discussion, it sorta de-dupes the links.

morphics• 14 years ago

Thanks for making me chuckle with the comments at the top of the source.

rocky1138• 14 years ago

It's neat, but I find things more useful when they're not separated by source/author, but in how interesting I'll find them. I don't read an Ars Technica article just because it's from ars.

To me it would be much better to get rid of the origin altogether to help eliminate bias and focus on the actual story.

lardissone• 14 years ago

Great collection of sources, but please, mark :visited links!

huhtenberg• 14 years ago

The more time I spend consuming, the less time I spend producing. And this is an online content firehose. It looks very nice and tempting, but thanks, but no, thanks.

brador20• 14 years ago

I say you need a mix of both. Abstinence is not the answer.

mdaniel• 14 years ago

I agree with you: 90% of the value of a developer is knowing what to type, which includes what NOT to type. Knowing the difference comes (IMHO) from being aware of what is out there and stories learned from the experience of others.

So yes: perhaps less cat videos is a good thing, but less exposure to information is not.

infinitebeam• 14 years ago

jimmyr.com has been my homepage for three years and counting.

ThomPete2• 14 years ago

May i suggest line-height: 160%

I know it will take away a few links from the viewarea but you will be able to read them faster IMHO.

brianfryer2• 14 years ago

Yes, this ^ please!

Perhaps a toggle of some sort?

brador20• 14 years ago

How did you come to the 160% figure? Golden triangle?

ThomPete2• 14 years ago

Experience :)

wahnfrieden• 14 years ago

Golden triangle is nonsense for design, by the way. Please don't let it inform your decisions. Most examples of it in nature are bogus.

nollidge• 14 years ago

This is pretty good. Currently I use NetVibes, which is buggy and actually TOO customizable. I like the strict grid layout.

If you made this a service, here's what would make me switch:

- customizable feeds (kind of obvious I guess)

- ability to mark items as read/unread (link color is not enough - I want to skip some items, or just read them all from the blog itself without clicking individual items)

- have individual feed header be a link to the feed's main page (it's the <link> element in RSS) - customize number of items per feed (e.g. I'd want more items for feeds which update frequently)

Nice to haves:

- tabs (I have LOTS of feeds - would be easier to manage instead of long scrolling)

- along with using the <link> element above, ability to override this, because I've noticed lots of feeds that don't set it properly (link to the domain root instead of the blog root, e.g.)

RoadRunner_23• 14 years ago

I currently use netvibes too. to customize rss feeds.. i use Yahoo Pipes. You can provide bunch of feeds to pipes, then add custom filters, sorts, terms and generate a custom RSS address. Add this address to netvibes.

and with this process, you will hardly ever visit any of the homepages except netvibes.

Nice project though.

wwwtyro• 14 years ago

Look at BBC's headlines compared to everyone else's. Someone explain this to me.

brador20• 14 years ago

My 2 guesses: SEO or that little sidebar box they have showing popular articles has a character limit to look good.

whalesalad• 14 years ago

I love the comment in the top of your source:

rjjacobson• 14 years ago

How are you pulling all of the headlines?

brador20• 14 years ago

RSS/xml.

tseabrooks3• 14 years ago

I love this. The only thing I might like as an addition would be the ability to reorganize and change the font. No login / account nonsense just save my ordering and font choice in a cookie or something.

brador20• 14 years ago

Reorganizing would be a tough cookie...but changing the font is possible.

Any particular fonts in mind?

tseabrooks3• 14 years ago

I had a secondary thought. Does this page auto refresh? Can I just leave it open on a separate virtual desktop... or do I need to refresh it?

brador20• 14 years ago

Does not auto-refresh right now. Reasoning: I wouldn't want to see a title, then see it vanish before I get to click it.

Potential solution for V2: Toggle switch.

Hates_3• 14 years ago

For whatever reason I can't CMD-Click an article without being taken straight to it. I normally like to open a load of links in the background then read them one by one.

brador20• 14 years ago

They're all set to target _blank...could that be affecting your CMD-clicking?

Hates_3• 14 years ago

It's more a case of them being set to _BLANK instead of _blank. If I edit the src to be the correct lowercase version, CMD-Clicking works as it should.

rkaplan• 14 years ago

This is an issue for me as well. Ideally, I'd like to be able to command-click five or ten articles, then get through them one by one, rather than having to return to SkimLinks after I read each one.

Hates_3• 14 years ago

Looks like this has been fixed. Thanks :)

brador20• 14 years ago

Yep, fixed! And the social buttons no longer hover.

What do you think of the line-height @ 160%? too much?

mijail• 14 years ago

Nice Work! I'm going to use this. If you want to make my OCD bookmarks bar perfect, can you add a favicon?

brador20• 14 years ago

I cannot believe I forgot to make a favicon! ha. Added to todo list.

tcgore• 14 years ago

I absolutely love this - now my new homepage. This is a very pleasant way to present this to my eyes. Even more importantly, it loads 'instantly', which is extremely important for a go-to/default site. In my opinion, drudgereport's popularity owes a lot to this combination of easy to absorb and quick loading times.

If I could make a suggestion - I would be interested in seeing a list of popularity based on clicks/time. To preserve the layout, you could only load it as a side column if the screen was wide enough to display more than 3 columns.

I actually think a site like this could turn into a one-man cash cow if you can get it to be a default site visited multiple times each day.

mrtunes• 14 years ago

great work! i will visit this often.

dtnguyen1• 14 years ago

I think it would be worth adding some way to filter/hide the sources. I like the idea of the whole thing, especially the simplicity, but I don't read nearly as many news sources as you, so it makes it kind of inconvenient to scroll/search through the whole thing to find the sites I am looking for

prakashk• 14 years ago

TheNextWeb appears twice on the page: first one after Mashable, and second after Geek. But, only the first four items are same in both lists. Fetched from different feed URLs?

Others have already said it, but I will say it again. Please remove the share buttons on top. On my phone (Firefox Mobile on G2), the share buttons keep scrolling down along with the content. In addition to taking up valuable screen space, it is quite annoying as it is quite jumpy and hides the actual content.

mathewsimonton• 14 years ago

Cool stuff!

I like brief little news feeds like this. They get to the point, there's not clutter with distracting pictures, etc. It's simple and all that's necessary.

On my computers I have Rainmeter installed and I link some general Google news feeds right onto my desktop: http://i.imgur.com/76Oc8.png . I wish I had more space though in my upper-right corner, could show more full headlines. A dual-monitor setup would probably be best...

slantyyz• 14 years ago

This reminds me a lot of Alltop.com - I believe you can create your own custom page there as well.

enraged_camel• 14 years ago

Excellent design. Within 5 seconds of visiting your site, I understood what it does and how it would be useful to me, and bookmarked it.

chrishan• 14 years ago

isn't this an un-customized version of http://www.newsblur.com/ ?

Show HN: my personal news reader, now public - SkimFeed.com

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