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Hey HN! I had the week off for the 4th of July holiday but canceled my vacation plans due to COVID, so I figured I'd do one of those "7 days of code" things whe
by mjirv 6y ago
Hey HN! I had the week off for the 4th of July holiday but canceled my vacation plans due to COVID, so I figured I'd do one of those "7 days of code" things where I do 7 different projects in the week. I wanted to create some things I would use and keep my programming skills sharp since I do data analytics rather than software engineering as my day job.
This was supposed to be Day 2, but ended up taking me about 3-4 days to get to the current state.
The problem I wanted to solve is that basically, I am addicted to Twitter. I get my news from Twitter, so I'm constantly pulling it up and scrolling through it throughout the day. But there's a lot of noise on Twitter--a ton of low quality content, mean-spirited comments, and so on. I wanted a way to stay on top of the news that met the following criteria:
1. One place to see new articles/posts from a bunch of different sources. I didn't want to have to pull up each news site individually.
2. No comments or noise--just the latest headlines.
3. Customizable - I can add new sources I come across, group them in different ways by subject.
4. Public - If someone else added some interesting news sites, it would be cool to see that and find something new to follow myself.
5. No authentication - Handling passwords and user state is a pain. Just let everyone see everything!
So I made "PaperPup" (the name came from the idea of your dog fetching you the morning paper). While there are other RSS aggregators out there, a lot of them feel clunky to me and don't necessarily have the public aspect I wanted. In technical terms, it's a Rails API backend with a "kind-of-vanilla" HTML/CSS/JQuery single-page front-end. As I mentioned I'm not really a software engineer, so this is nothing fancy; I wanted to make sure my skills on some of the basics were still up-to-date rather than experimenting with whatever the hot new languages/frameworks are these days.
Anyway, I hope you all like it! If you have any suggestions or questions (technical, feature-wise, or other apps to use), I'd love to hear them.
- wheresvic4 6y agoLooks nice! Congrats on shipping! One thing that irked me was the lack of a back functionality. You could use a hash router and just make pages for the categories so one could easily go back to the home page :)
- mjirv 6y agoAh yes that's probably something I should add. It irked me too when I was starting out but then I got used to using the "Home" button and forgot that I needed to do something about it. UPDATE: There is a back button now.
- pigeonstorm 6y ago> No authentication - Handling passwords and user state is a pain. Just let everyone see everything! yes. exactly and the whole concept, though simple, is just amazing. A one-stop shop for updates. Great job!
- mjirv 6y agoThank you, I’m happy you like it! Glad my laziness as a developer is also appreciated haha.