amatriain

There is a small but vibrant community that uses hangouts video conferencing to play tabletop roleplaying games, with the added bonus of having sessions automatically saved to youtube. There are also people with unmonetized youtube channels that consist of videopodcasts: hangouts video conferences between several people talking about whatever.

For these use cases restricting Hangouts Meet to gsuite customers means Hangouts is dead for them. I guess most people will switch to videoconferencing with Skype+OBS and streaming live to Twitch. It will work but it's harder to set up for non technical people.

Of course google does not owe me nothing and they can do as they like with their (until now) free product. But it's a pity that these common use cases that were possible with Hangouts are going to be discontinued.

It would for users that have 2FA enabled.

It certainly shouldn't do that. Unfortunately I cannot reproduce it, it works fine here.

Loading entries (among other things) is done with web workers. Are you blocking the execution of web workers or dynamic loading of remote javascripts, by any chance?

I develop and maintain an open source RSS reader. In my experience it's not so bad. I strip CSS and javascript from feeds, and most of them are displayed fine anyway. I don't think I've ever found a feed that needed javascript to load content, it seems even SPAs include plain entry content in their feeds, thankfully. I've never found a feed that became unreadable after stripping styling either.

I agree it's interesting to look at your content when loaded in an RSS reader. IMHO most feeds are actually more readable when loaded in a clean uncluttered RSS reader than in the original webpage. If the content is good, the reading experience should not be harmed by focusing just on its text and images and removing extra styling.

Shameless plug: the RSS reader I maintain is https://www.feedbunch.com , comments are welcome.

I keep working on FeedBunch - http://feedbunch.com

It is an open source general-purpose feed reader (RSS/Atom). It attempts to be as fast and intuitive as possible, hiding complexity from the user as much as possible.

It is a very nice library. However be aware that it currently has issues in chrome if your page has several icons: https://github.com/ejci/favico.js/issues/85

So does the recently released Shadowrun: Hong Kong.

I have to mention that I develop Feedbunch, an open-source RSS reader. It can be self-hosted, needs Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL.

https://www.feedbunch.com

https://github.com/amatriain/feedbunch

It works in SQLite now. I'll wait for the next release. Thanks!

The search feature currently only works on Postgres. It builds an SQL sentence with an ILIKE clause, for case-insensitive matching, which I think is valid only in Postgres. It's not a huge problem for me, but I'd like having full SQLite support for when I'm in development mode.

They said they will work on a connector architecture to support other RDBMS, I hope it's not too difficult.

It looks nicer and is more easily configurable than ActiveAdmin. For simple CRUD it's probably the best admin gem I've seen. However I usually build moderately complex dashboards in ActiveAdmin (things like "show me lists with the 10 oldest open tickets and the 10 unassigned tickets with the highest priority"), and I'm not sure how would one replicate this in Administrate.

Yes, I was using the last version in all machines (some mint, some arch).

I was trying to sync seven machines in three different physical locations, some with slow internet connectivity; only one machine in each location had its syncthing ports open to the internet through NAT. I'm not sure it's a supported use case: syncing in the same LAN generally worked fine, but changes often didn't propagate correctly to other locations; for instance a folder name change sometimes was not propagated to the remote locations, and after some time the machine in which the rename had happened detected that the rest of the machines in the syncthing group had a folder which didn't exist locally (the folder with the old name), and downloaded it from its peers. The result was that the folder was duplicated everywhere, with both the old and the new name.

The same happened sometimes with deletions: sometimes they didn't propagate over LAN boundaries, and this resulted in the deleted files reappearing after some time.

A machine staying "syncing..." forever also happened sometimes, requiring a manual restart of the service. I couldn't reliably reproduce it though.

I like the project and I'm sure if I reported the issues in github they'd have given support. I wish I had the time for properly reporting and investigating, but I really needed a syncing solution I could trust for a small business and I needed it ASAP, so I settled for owncloud (which for the moment has not given me any surprises). I will try to find some time to reproduce the bugs in my personal machines and report them, but I really didn't have the time when I found them.

I really like the philosophy of the project and the guys running it, but my recent experience trying to use it as a dropbox replacement has been bad: machines that stayed "syncing..." forever, deleted files that reappeared after a while, renamed folders resulting in duplicated folders with both the old and the new name...

I think it's just that the software is not yet mature and production-ready, and perhaps I was throwing too much data at it at once. Seeing the project progress, I'm confident that when it becomes more stable it will be a very nice piece of software, but it's not there yet.

Germany passed a law intending to make Google pay for using news snippets.

Google simply stopped including snippets from german newspapers.

German newspapers reluctantly gave an exemption to Google so that it would publish snippets from their websites again.

What more evidence do you need? Perhaps only a letter written in blood and signed "give us an exemption or else" accompanied with a horse head would convince you about Google's negotiation tactics here?

This is the best link I've found with a quick search

http://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/22/german-publishers-c...

It's been widely discussed

http://www.dw.de/german-publishers-vs-google/a-18030444

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/05/us-google-axel-spr...

In the end german newspapers gave Google permission to use snippets of content without paying any royalties. They needed Google News traffic more than Google needed them.

Which is the reason why spanish lawmakers made a similar law but with a mandatory royalties clause. Spanish newspapers cannot give an exemption to any company, under the law paying royalties for using snippets is mandatory regardless of the content owner wishes. This law is not currently being enforced, but the consequences are dramatic all the same: Google has shut down Google News Spain, and other content aggregators are under threat of being hit with fines at any moment.

And that's why I'm not currently allowing feedbunch.com users to subscribe to RSS feeds from spanish newspaper publishers, until the situation changes. Anti-monopoly legislation is fine, but sometimes it can be a hammer that the big players use to hit each other instead of a tool to help new players get in the market.

There are three ways to send feedback or ask for help:

- twitter (@feedbunch)

- github issue tracker (github.com/amatriain/feedbunch)

- email (admin@feedbunch.com)

They are indicated in the landing page and in the signup, login and other pages.

I don't understand your question about the HN feed. HN has an RSS feed (https://news.ycombinator.com/rss) which as far as I can tell includes every link posted to the front page, but not necessarily in the same order. Feedbunch does not create this feed, HN does, and I guess only someone from HN could explain what gets added to the feed. Feedbunch just shows whatever is in the feed.

At the moment I'm afraid I can't offer an estimate of the user fees once out of the beta phase. The beta will among other things serve as a stress test, giving me an idea of the server resources necessary for the service. That will give me an idea of the costs associated with running the SaaS, which will help decide the user fees. For the moment I simply have too little data, sorry. I intend it to be very affordable, if it helps.

I understand you being worried that a service you use may disappear. But realistically that can happen with absolutely any SaaS. Being backed by a big company is no guarantee in this regard, as Google has shown with google reader and other services. My intention is to keep Feedbunch running for as long as possible, but I was also burned by the GReader shutdown so I understand your concern. The best I can offer is this: Feedbunch has an OPML export feature, so any user can take his subscriptions to any other feed reader that supports OPML whenever he wants. That's the best way to avoid vendor lock-in: to work with interoperable standards so that you can take your data elsewhere if necessary. And of course being opensource you can self-host it.

In case you're interested I originally built Feedbunch for myself when GReader closed down, because I was unhappy with the alternatives. I've been using it for my feed reading needs for some time. Offering it as a SaaS is an extension of that, but the project started as a way for me to have a reader I liked. I'm not aiming to catch the eye of a big company here, but to run a good service.

That was a bit all over the place but I hope I addressed your questions.

You're right, there's room for improvement in the signup process, to show the user something more useful and enticing after signup but before email confirmation. A couple of you have mentioned it. I'll work on it.

Feedbunch currently uses the default Bootstrap tipography, so I'm a bit surprised that it gives you trouble. However a couple of you have mentioned it so I'll definitely look into it.

What do the rest of you think about the tipography? Too small, hard to read, good the way it is?

Feedbunch does NOT mark entries as read after a certain period. That's not a feature of RSS at all, I guess it is a feedly-specific feature (or anti-feature, I guess, depending on your needs).

What Feedbunch does, however, is limit how many entries it remembers for each feed. The current limit is 500 entries for a single feed; once a feed has more than 500 entries the oldest ones are removed until there are 500 left. The number (500) could be subject to change during the beta phase if users' feedback indicates it is too high or too low.

Keyboard shortcuts are definitely in the roadmap. Thanks for the rest of the suggestions, I'll consider them.

There are many new users currently importing their OPML files. There is a rather large backlog in the queue but be patient, in a few minutes it will process your import. You will receive a notification email when it finishes.

Unfortunately I can no longer edit this submission's title.

Anyway, the "About Feedbunch" of the landing page says that it is opensource (MIT license). Maybe it should be more prominent.

Keyboard shortcuts are in the roadmap, but not yet implemented.

It's an often requested feature, though, so I'll prioritize it :)

Sure. Use this:

email: demo@feedbunch.com

password: feedbunch-demo

Hi guys.

I've released Feedbunch, a web app to read RSS and Atom feeds similar to the disappeared google reader. Signups are currently open and it will be totally free for at least as long as it is in the beta phase.

It aims to be simple to use, hiding unnecessary complexity from the user as much as possible (feed autodiscovery, detecting when a feed has changed its URL, etc). It is responsive and supports being installed to the home screen in mobile devices, behaving almost like a native app.

Feedbunch is opensource under the MIT license. The backend is a json REST API built with Ruby on Rails, and the frontend is a mix of Bootstrap and AngularJS.

I'm very interested in hearing your opinion and I hope you find it useful.

"The West, he says, needs to do "new things." Innovation, he says, comes from a "frontier" culture, a culture of "exceptionalism," where "people expect to do exceptional things"—in our world, still an almost uniquely American characteristic, and one we're losing."

Ok, the article lost me there. I really can't connect with that way of thinking.

Well, I don't fully agree with this guy (I think I don't, actually I'm not fully sure of where he's going). But I've also thought for some time that user-side scripting in modern AJAX apps is getting ridiculous. If you look at the javascript code generated for a GWT app, for instance, it's quite large and hardly understandable.

I don't know, web app development sometimes feels a lot like trying to turn screws with a hammer. HTML4 wasn't really designed to support dynamic applications, yet we've made it work, more or less, by abusing and patching. Nevertheless it was designed for static content, and it shows.

I'm afraid I'm not too familiar with HTML5 yet, so I don't know if it changes this, but from what little I've read it doesn't seem so.

Paper and pencil are great, until you realize you have to insert a couple of lines of code up there.

I guess he means that if it's not a problem in a use case in which their corporate clients are interested, it is a non-issue for them.