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Hello! 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 ne

Hello! 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 6y ago
I think it’s awesome :)
chris_st 6y ago
Wow, 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 6y ago
  RSS 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.
  - chris_st 6y ago
    Cool, thanks! I'm doing a lot with AWS serverless, it's a great way to go (and similarly cheap). Any chance you could open-source your scraping code?
  - k1m 6y ago
    You might have come across this already, but we maintain a collection of article extraction rules for various sites here https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config - it was adapted from a database maintained by Instapaper in its early days and today has contributions mainly from users and developers of an open source Instapaper/Pocket alternative called Wallabag: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag Also usable with a free version of Full-Text RSS available here: https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss/src/master/
    - jkeuhlen 6y ago
      This looks really interesting! I've been building an RSS reader for myself in my free time, and this will be really useful. I was wondering if you know anything about the legal implications around scraping full-content like this and packaging it up? I was planning to do it with some fun added-on features, but was worried it would be considered copy-right infringement (since I would basically be re-hosting other site's content without permission). And some websites outright ban this kind of usage in the TOS for their RSS feeds. For example, from the Washington Post[1] > a. For any article, you may not display more text than we provide in the RSS feed. [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/rss-terms-of-service/2012/01/16/gIQAadFYAQ_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/rss-terms-of-service/2012/01/...
    - chris_st 6y ago
      AWESOME! Thanks so much, I'll look into that. I think it was the Instapaper service I was using back in the day.
k1m 6y ago
Love to see experiments like this with web articles. Have you thought about making it more print focused? It's the kind of layout I'd want to print out and read offline. I've experimented a little with trying to create more readable, printable layouts of web articles and feeds on https://www.fivefilters.org https://www.fivefilters.org [1],[2] but yours has a much more traditional newspaper look which could look great in print. [1] Simple Print for single articles https://pdf.fivefilters.org/simple-print/ https://pdf.fivefilters.org/simple-print/ [2] PDF from feed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=854Csokl3QA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=854Csokl3QA
bovermyer 6y ago
Have you tried using a CSS "masonry" approach to address the varying sizes of the articles? For example: https://w3bits.com/css-masonry/ https://w3bits.com/css-masonry/
- pp19dd 6y ago
  Also, check out Isotope. Seems to handle different-sized "cells" fairly neatly - https://isotope.metafizzy.co/layout-modes.html https://isotope.metafizzy.co/layout-modes.html
- baybal2 6y ago
  CSS columns?
- baybal2 6y ago
  BTW, you can do very complex transforms with XSLT on RSS https://www.bennadel.com/rss https://www.bennadel.com/rss also take a look on feedburner
vagab0nd 6y ago
This is exactly what I've been looking for. Thanks! Other than scrolling it looks really good. Do you use any framework for the frontend? If so, could you open source it?
- arussellsaw 6y ago
  Thanks! I’m glad you like it The CSS framework i use is https://bulma.io https://bulma.io and the server side rendering is all done with Go’s html/template library. I’m definitely going to open source it but I’m too ashamed of the code right now, this evening is going to be cleaning and ‘production using’ the code
MarkusQ 6y ago
This is awesome! Now if you could just get an AI to rewrite the content to bring it up to the old (roughly pre-"USA Today") journalistic standards, it would be perfect! But that's probably too much to ask.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  I second this, reminds me of this: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/c13uq/i_just_found_the_earliest_known_example_of_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/c13uq/i_just_fo...
  - sh87 6y ago
    > All votes shall be counted by honest and stalwart men of virtue Hah, had a good laugh out of this. Thanks for sharing.
exclipy 6y ago
Love it! It's great to see web design finally start to scale to large and wide screens. I hope this is the start of a movement. Have you seen pressreader.com's layout? eg. https://thewashingtonpost.pressreader.com/the-washington-post/20200414/textview https://thewashingtonpost.pressreader.com/the-washington-pos... They have some really nice ideas, implemented well. See for example how the articles click to expand. And the horizontal scrolling there works so well with the columns!
rodolphoarruda 6y ago
I showed this to my old father and he laughed for a long 1 minute. It was really an unexpected surprise.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
if it's supposed to be laid out like a newspaper shouldn't it use column-count etc. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/01/css-multiple-column-layout-multicol/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/01/css-multiple-column... It seemed like everything was flex? maybe I'm wrong, and I missed it somewhere?
richardboegli 6y ago
@arussellsaw - might want to have a closer look at this [0] for some inspiration [0] https://wwweeebbb.com/ https://wwweeebbb.com/
jaydouken 6y ago
This is awesome! Love the idea, do you intend to make this a bigger project?
alberth 6y ago
I loved the NYTimes "Times Reader", circa 2008, when it was released. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/packages/html/firstlook/timesreader/introducing_times_reader.html?scp=12&sq=times%2520reader&st=cse https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/packages/html/fi... You might want to look into it for design inspiration since the NYTimes solved for a lot of design problems I'm sure you've had to tackle/consider. Great work btw.
ghego1 6y ago
I love the scrolling! My first thought was "finally a way to read the whole rss feed without the need to click on a link". I'd keep it that way. Also, I think that the scrolling feature is one of the most innovative things I've seen in many years on how to format articles on the web. It makes a lot of sense to be honest IMH.
hinkley 6y ago
> I'm going to switch to truncating articles this evening, and linking to a single article page. Ah, much better now. Paper newspapers do this in spades, so this behavior shouldn’t surprise most people. I hate to say his, but you might have to turn on justification to make it look more paper-like. In doing so you can get rid of many of the vertical separator lines (but you might need to be more conservative with max columns)

chrismatheson 6y ago

I think it’s awesome :)

chris_st 6y ago

Wow, 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 6y ago
RSS 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.
- chris_st 6y ago
  Cool, thanks! I'm doing a lot with AWS serverless, it's a great way to go (and similarly cheap). Any chance you could open-source your scraping code?
- k1m 6y ago
  You might have come across this already, but we maintain a collection of article extraction rules for various sites here https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config - it was adapted from a database maintained by Instapaper in its early days and today has contributions mainly from users and developers of an open source Instapaper/Pocket alternative called Wallabag: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag Also usable with a free version of Full-Text RSS available here: https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss/src/master/
  - jkeuhlen 6y ago
    This looks really interesting! I've been building an RSS reader for myself in my free time, and this will be really useful. I was wondering if you know anything about the legal implications around scraping full-content like this and packaging it up? I was planning to do it with some fun added-on features, but was worried it would be considered copy-right infringement (since I would basically be re-hosting other site's content without permission). And some websites outright ban this kind of usage in the TOS for their RSS feeds. For example, from the Washington Post[1] > a. For any article, you may not display more text than we provide in the RSS feed. [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/rss-terms-of-service/2012/01/16/gIQAadFYAQ_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/rss-terms-of-service/2012/01/...
  - chris_st 6y ago
    AWESOME! Thanks so much, I'll look into that. I think it was the Instapaper service I was using back in the day.

k1m 6y ago

Love to see experiments like this with web articles. Have you thought about making it more print focused? It's the kind of layout I'd want to print out and read offline. I've experimented a little with trying to create more readable, printable layouts of web articles and feeds on https://www.fivefilters.org https://www.fivefilters.org [1],[2] but yours has a much more traditional newspaper look which could look great in print. [1] Simple Print for single articles https://pdf.fivefilters.org/simple-print/ https://pdf.fivefilters.org/simple-print/ [2] PDF from feed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=854Csokl3QA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=854Csokl3QA

bovermyer 6y ago

Have you tried using a CSS "masonry" approach to address the varying sizes of the articles? For example: https://w3bits.com/css-masonry/ https://w3bits.com/css-masonry/

pp19dd 6y ago
Also, check out Isotope. Seems to handle different-sized "cells" fairly neatly - https://isotope.metafizzy.co/layout-modes.html https://isotope.metafizzy.co/layout-modes.html
baybal2 6y ago
CSS columns?
baybal2 6y ago
BTW, you can do very complex transforms with XSLT on RSS https://www.bennadel.com/rss https://www.bennadel.com/rss also take a look on feedburner

vagab0nd 6y ago

This is exactly what I've been looking for. Thanks! Other than scrolling it looks really good. Do you use any framework for the frontend? If so, could you open source it?

arussellsaw 6y ago
Thanks! I’m glad you like it The CSS framework i use is https://bulma.io https://bulma.io and the server side rendering is all done with Go’s html/template library. I’m definitely going to open source it but I’m too ashamed of the code right now, this evening is going to be cleaning and ‘production using’ the code

MarkusQ 6y ago

This is awesome! Now if you could just get an AI to rewrite the content to bring it up to the old (roughly pre-"USA Today") journalistic standards, it would be perfect! But that's probably too much to ask.

runawaybottle 6y ago
I second this, reminds me of this: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/c13uq/i_just_found_the_earliest_known_example_of_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/c13uq/i_just_fo...
- sh87 6y ago
  > All votes shall be counted by honest and stalwart men of virtue Hah, had a good laugh out of this. Thanks for sharing.

exclipy 6y ago

Love it! It's great to see web design finally start to scale to large and wide screens. I hope this is the start of a movement. Have you seen pressreader.com's layout? eg. https://thewashingtonpost.pressreader.com/the-washington-post/20200414/textview https://thewashingtonpost.pressreader.com/the-washington-pos... They have some really nice ideas, implemented well. See for example how the articles click to expand. And the horizontal scrolling there works so well with the columns!

rodolphoarruda 6y ago

I showed this to my old father and he laughed for a long 1 minute. It was really an unexpected surprise.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

if it's supposed to be laid out like a newspaper shouldn't it use column-count etc. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/01/css-multiple-column-layout-multicol/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/01/css-multiple-column... It seemed like everything was flex? maybe I'm wrong, and I missed it somewhere?

richardboegli 6y ago

@arussellsaw - might want to have a closer look at this [0] for some inspiration [0] https://wwweeebbb.com/ https://wwweeebbb.com/

jaydouken 6y ago

This is awesome! Love the idea, do you intend to make this a bigger project?

alberth 6y ago

I loved the NYTimes "Times Reader", circa 2008, when it was released. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/packages/html/firstlook/timesreader/introducing_times_reader.html?scp=12&sq=times%2520reader&st=cse https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/packages/html/fi... You might want to look into it for design inspiration since the NYTimes solved for a lot of design problems I'm sure you've had to tackle/consider. Great work btw.

ghego1 6y ago

I love the scrolling! My first thought was "finally a way to read the whole rss feed without the need to click on a link". I'd keep it that way. Also, I think that the scrolling feature is one of the most innovative things I've seen in many years on how to format articles on the web. It makes a lot of sense to be honest IMH.

hinkley 6y ago

> I'm going to switch to truncating articles this evening, and linking to a single article page. Ah, much better now. Paper newspapers do this in spades, so this behavior shouldn’t surprise most people. I hate to say his, but you might have to turn on justification to make it look more paper-like. In doing so you can get rid of many of the vertical separator lines (but you might need to be more conservative with max columns)