

NewsBlur (hosted feed reader) - swah
http://www.newsblur.com/

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balakk
I like this a lot. I'm a lil too cheap to buy, but I'll at least throw in a
word of appreciation :)

This is almost an essential service; it's what Google Reader should be; it's
slicker, tasteful and fast.

Some suggested improvements: The toolbar buttons are cryptic, and takes time
to find out. I was hunting for the prefs button.

I wish there was an offline option too. Still then, great job! One less Google
service to use :)

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sikhnerd
Comments last time this came up: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1834305>

~~~
conesus
A ton has happened in the past year since I launched NewsBlur. River of News,
iPhone app, Android app, an official API, major speed improvements on both the
backend and frontend, a public user-support forum, and many, many user-
customizations.

Heck, just check out the activity graph on GitHub:
<http://github.com/samuelclay> (and follow me there... I live on props and
need your love).

The next year is going to be full of improvements: search, major upgrades to
the [free] iPhone app, and more social features that you can shake a stick at.
My stomach-butterflies are tingling just at the thought of the cool shit I get
to build next.

~~~
StavrosK
Wait, what the hell? This is open source? How do you make money? This is
amazing! I'm switching over to it right now.

~~~
conesus
Open-source doesn't have to mean non-profit. I make money with premium
accounts -- accounts are free up until 64 feeds. Also, feeds are updated more
often for premium users (but only for feeds that they are the sole subscriber,
otherwise they get the collective benefit of multiple subscribers).

Sure, folks can host their own copy of NewsBlur and keep it up to date. But
it's a PitA, and I have 7 servers happily chugging away fetching, parsing,
storing, and retrieving feeds for you. Hosting is worth is a lot.

The main idea behind open-sourcing the code is so that a community can develop
around the API, new features, and user-contributed code. I've had a number of
pull requests and issues found in the code thanks to NewsBlur's many talented
developer users.

~~~
StavrosK
Oh, sure, the two questions were actually sort of unrelated. The "I can't be
arsed" factor is pretty high on this, so I'd probably get an account rather
than set my own thing up, but it's nice to know that I can if I need to. To
clarify, the open source version has everything the premium account has,
correct?

~~~
conesus
Yes, it does, but setting up a premium account for yourself is not automatic.
You need to know how to read code to do it. Here are the relevant Python
commands:

    
    
        >>> u = User.objects.get(username='StavrosK')
        >>> u.profile.active_premium()
    

That will flip the premium bit on your account. Perhaps I should add that to
the self-hosting documentation.

~~~
StavrosK
Also, this is driving me crazy, but how do you mark something as unread? The
UI is a bit frustrating, I spent a minute looking for the logout link :/ How
can I remove feeds completely? How can I reimport things from Google Reader if
I've registered already? How can I see a stream of everything, rather than
only one feed?

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fotoblur
I remember the first time I saw your site and thought, interesting name.
Simply for the fact that I'm the founder of fotoblur.com and wireblur.com. It
was easy to find domain names after attaching 'blur' to the name (a 3 month
search for fotoblur) :)! For photography it kind of made sense.

@conesus: However I'm curious. How did you decide on the name? I'm not
claiming any inspiration, however, according to whois the newsblur.com was
registered on 18-feb-2009 whereas fotoblur was on 28-sep-2007 ;)!

Motorola also got in on the act: <https://portal-moto.svcmot.com/moto-web-
portal/>

~~~
conesus
At one point I changed the name to Protoread, meaning Read the Original
[site]. It took about 24 hours before I switched to Protopub. And then 3 days
later, right back to NewsBlur.

To be honest, I used the word blur because when following dozens, if not
hundreds of sites, they all start to blur together. So I hooked on to that
mental picture and embraced the dilemma. Might as well know what you're
getting into--NewsBlur.

The S. Jobs recommendation on the subject of naming businesses was to find a
good word within the domain, then make it sexy. I'm struggling to think of the
examples that would complete this anecdote, but NewsBlur is about as sexy a
name as a feed reader gets.

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swah
@conesus: how cool that this is also open source. How is using SQL + NoSQL
working for you? Also, Django: most folks say you hit a wall and its hard to
swap components... but you seem to be doing fine with it?

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donpark
Very nice but it seems to me that you are proxying only the top page off blogs
and not the resources referenced by that page, including scripts, which is a
security issue.

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frankdenbow
Ah, I started using this last year but havent checked it out in a while. It
looks great and works really well, but I just tend to forget about these
things sometimes.

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gregstoll
NewsBlur is great - thanks conesus! Bought a subscription a few months ago and
it's worked great for me.

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p4bl0
I don't see a way of sharing items as a feed (like the shared items in Google
Reader), is this possible? If I can do this I would be happy to use NewsBlur!
Because I gave a try to Tiny Tiny RSS and it just don't do it for me. I still
have to try RSSLounge, but I like NewsBlur.

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oacgnol
Is this still a one-man operation? I'm very impressed with it (and even more
so if it's just you) and have showed some of my coworkers.

How much time do you dedicate to developing and maintaining NewsBlur? Do you
do this full time now?

~~~
conesus
Hardly full-time. I have 45 minutes in the morning on Caltrain, and 45 minutes
back. I work 3-4 hours on one of the weekend days, and occasionally an hour or
two on weekday nights. For 28 months now.

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mrleinad
I tried this about a year ago. At the time, it was not so good. Looks like
they improved it a lot! I like it!

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mysteryleo
Dude. This is pretty cool. The stats on the front page are interesting. 104
playing users already

~~~
conesus
Actually, I'm nearing 500 premium users. That's the number of premium users
using NewsBlur in the past _24 hours_. In fact, all of those stats are
aggregate for the past 24 hours.

It's the kind of transparency that I think goes hand-in-hand with being open-
source. Why bother hiding it? I'm constantly watching those stats, so maybe
other folks may also be interested. It also helps to know when there's a ton
of activity, in case the site feels slow. Although it's been a long time that
having a huge spike in traffic has made the site slow. Check that average load
time graph. Notice how even though the number of feeds loaded has spiked in
the past 3 hours, the average load time has actually gone _down_. Stats, for
those who care, are endlessly fascinating.

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talbina
This was built while riding NYC subway lines.

~~~
conesus
Specifically the A train. But I have since moved to San Francisco, so now much
of it is built on MUNI (N train) and Caltrain. But boy do I miss the focus
that being on a crowded and uncomfortable subway car brings you.

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shpoonj
This site is overwhelmingly busy. I can't tell what's going on. I can't tell
what it's supposed to do, so I can't tell if it's doing it well. One thing is
clear though: it's an eyesore.

~~~
radicaldreamer
Agreed, functionally it seems to work pretty well, but with so much going on,
it was very difficult to make sense of.

Keep your backend, but look to Reeder or other similar feed readers for
inspiration to improve your UI/UX and this will become a great product.

