18 ms·
The Webpage, an online RSS reader and news aggregator, styled like a newspaper
- totetsu 7y agoInteresting, but hard to read.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- glaberficken 7y agoMy thoughts exactly. For these particular reasons IMHO: - the nested scrolling (it would be much cooler if you could come up with an algorithm that lays out the page like real print newspapers do. Or truncate and display a read more link/expander) - too many separator "lines" (i would reduce the quantity of lines and reduce the "color weight" of the ones that remain) - remove the YAAS.CAT link. ? =)
- DagAgren 7y agoIt takes a lot of work, in terms of text content editing, typography and layout to make a newspaper actually readable. It is a lot of work, and takes a lot of very specialised skill. This page does none of that, and it makes something that is otherwise very invisible suddenly come into stark contrast when it is missing.
- neilsense 7y agoI got caught out by the nested scrolling
- smartDevel 7y agoawesome
- chrismorgan 7y agoThe content is wrapping at every character, rather than on word boundaries or with hyphenation. The relevant styles: .subcol { hyphens: auto; word-break: break-all; } `word-break: break-all` should be replaced with `overflow-wrap: break-word`. Those two properties are quite subtle in their meaning and interactions.
- gedy 7y agoAlso toss in for full effect: text-align: justify; -webkit-hyphens: auto; /* Safari */
- leshokunin 7y agoLove the idea. Really hard to navigate and read, because content ends up in little boxes. But I love it as a bit of fun!
- donohoe 7y agoIf you can't say anything nice don't say anything at all :) That said; I've been on HN long enough where news sites (some of which I worked at) took this approach on some products where they directly took print-styles and applied them digitally. They were vocally criticized (rightly so) for completely mis-understanding the new digital medium. This is a fun and interesting project - buts its entirely unusable and provides a very poor reading experience. Among many other points, it misses the point that the full-page physical newspaper was entirely scannable in large areas. This is the opposite of that. Kudos to the developer trying something for fun but I hope this isn't a serious approach to reading news.
- metabagel 7y agoThe L.A. Times has a really polished version of this, which I sometimes prefer over the regular articles. It has the effect of a full color scan of the entire newspaper. If you click in an article, you are taken to a standalone page for reading. You might have to be a subscriber to access it.
- catacombs 7y ago> Kudos to the developer trying something for fun but I hope this isn't a serious approach to reading news. Author literally said he did this for fun.
- arussellsaw 7y agoHello! author here, i just wanted to address a few things i've seen in the comments: * i absolutely built this for fun, it's an idea i had late at night and needed to scratch that itch * the scolling sucks, laying out arbitrarily sized articles into a given layout is a challenge, and the scrolling hides a lot of the sins. I'm going to switch to truncating articles this evening, and linking to a single article page. * thanks for the suggestions on hyphenation, i've been playing with a few different approaches but none have worked with all the browsers i tried, i'll give a few suggestions a go this evening!
- chrismatheson 7y agoI think it’s awesome :)
- chris_st 7y agoWow, what a great idea, and largely fantastic implementation! It really looks good. Do RSS feeds have "just" text that you pull to get the article content, or are you parsing the webpage somehow? If so, how? I've done something slightly (well, about 1% :-) similar for the "Popular" page on pinboard[0]. It used to have a line or two from the start of the article, using a webpage content extractor that got turned off, so I can't use it anymore. One arguably nice thing about mine is that it's updated once a day, and it remembers what you've read yesterday, so new articles are marked, and you can flip a switch to see the new stuff first. Thanks! [0] https://pbpb.cls.cloud https://pbpb.cls.cloud
- arussellsaw 7y agoRSS feeds are a bit of a mess, but only due to each publisher's implementation being slightly different. the vast majority only send a headline and summary on the RSS feed, i then have to go and scrape and extract the article on the backend to populate the content, which is it's own challenge and i've not gotten it to work for a few sites yet. This is also running in a semi-serverless container in Google Cloud Run (only costs me £1 a month!) so fetching and re-caching all of that when a new container is scheduled is painful, however it seems like state in the container is persisted longer than i initially thought, so it's good enough for now.
- Aeolun 7y agoThis seriously needs some paragraph breaks in the articles. Every article reads like one huge sentence. I think print newspapers do this with a slight indent to every paragraph.
- btbuildem 7y agoNewspapers have margins!
- iamshs 7y agoI love it. Instant fan. Different experience than usual.
- jaspax 7y ago"RSS Feeds for the 20th Century" feels pretty dated. I want to see "RSS Feeds for the 19th Century".
- jrochkind1 7y agoI'm interested in the concept, but I think the execution needs some improvement to be comfortable. For instance, no actual online newspaper right now has internal scrollbars; there are probably reasons for this. Online newspapers look something like print newspapers, but the most successful designs are successful at adapting the design for the particular affordances of the screen. (Granted, internal scrollbars ARE something you can't do in print, unique to the screen! They just aren't, I think, something anyone wants...)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ape4 7y agoCould work nicely with that eink project that was showing the NY Times full size. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22831323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22831323
- newsrss 7y agoUnfortunately images look like crap, due to them being way too low resolution. Probably because the images used are dithered and upscaled from small original images.
- rob74 7y agoLooks cool, just one suggestion about the photos: that effect looks like the dithering of a dot matrix printer and not like a newspaper photo, for that I would go with this kind of effect: https://i.pinimg.com/474x/9d/76/f0/9d76f0c303e7ea8352d10465d8462b5d.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/474x/9d/76/f0/9d76f0c303e7ea8352d10465d... - I think it's called a "screening" effect?
- chadlavi 7y agoWould love to be able to use a personalizable version of this
- chimen 7y agoA scroll trap
- ahuth 7y agoThis is really cool! It would be nice to see h tags used for article headings. That way people using assistive technology can navigate around faster. And this may be a good opportunity to use the article tag.
- quaffapint 7y agoWhat, no comics?
- ccozan 7y agoOr the crosswords section?
- saadalem 7y agoWoooooooooooooooooow. I could be downvoted, but I can't say nothing other than that. WELL DONE !
- heinrichhartman 7y agoPretty sure it violates copyright of the publishers. Given that Google is not allowed to show more than the headline and a few words in their search results in the EU, I suspect this is just plain illegal. This is sad. We should have better laws. Hope you don't get sued. EDIT: Please let me know if my understanding is incorrect.
- metabagel 7y agoYou might have to be a subscriber to access it, but I suggest taking a look at the L.A. Times enewspaper for inspiration. It’s like a full color scan of the newspaper. If you click in an article, you are taken to a separate page to read the article in full. https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/latimes/default.aspx?pubid=50435180-e58e-48b5-8e0c-236bf740270e https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/latimes/default.aspx...
- jsmith45 7y agoWow. clearly designed only for touch screens. Needing to click and drag the mouse to pan on a desktop is absolutely terrible.
- rchaud 7y agoI remember the Wall Street Journal's tablet apps having a layout just like this, so it resembled their broadsheet look. It was a pleasure to read, as clicking on individual stories took you to the full story, still laid out like a newspaper, and not to their website inside of a web wrapper view. For whatever reason, they changed that and now the app looks like their website, except with more ads and tracking.
- wtmt 7y agoNot sure if I’d use it with the scrolling, since this format is ill suited for smaller screens, but I love this idea! One more suggestion for you to consider: a variant where each article is a link that takes the reader to a separate article page (like a normal web page) may be good. The use case is to have this print layout to skim through headlines and snippets, and dig into an article by itself if one wants to read more (and the article doesn’t fit within the non-scrolling area).
- shanecleveland 7y agoI've always loved the idea of having a personally-curated newspaper laid out in the traditional way. This could be fun. Thanks for sharing.
- baybal2 7y agoI wonder, can somebody turn it into an XSL stylesheet?
- gregoire 7y agoReminds me of this old Mac and iPad app: https://acrylicapps.com/pulp/ https://acrylicapps.com/pulp/
- azmodeus 7y agoFeels great not having the usual information overload that websites have. Lovely project well done!
- agumonkey 7y agoFunny how this is a good settling of information presentation .. most websites are low signal high noise (visuals count as noise for me now, I'm old).
- bobbydreamer 7y agoGood work. Scrolling was tricky in mobile.
- floatingatoll 7y agoPhone or tablet?
- anigbrowl 7y agoI do not hate it despite its limitations
- chanmad29 7y agoThis looks so much like an e-paper but only better and way easier to navigate!
- pseingatl 7y agoOffline already?
- Leths 7y agoHi, this was fantastic but it doens't work anymore. Any reason why? Victim of success ?