
Show HN: PaperPup – Discover new articles from blogs and websites in one UI - mjirv
https://paperpup.herokuapp.com
======
mjirv
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
Looks 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
Ah 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.

------
ci5er
It's a bit tighter than Memeorandum. That's kind of cool...

~~~
mjirv
Thanks! I actually hadn’t come across Memeorandum before, but it looks neat. I
like its simplicity as well, and the previews it shows. One issue I ran into
making this is that not all RSS feeds seem to contain descriptions, so it was
hard to make something like that work and look consistent.

~~~
ci5er
Yeah - It's actually pretty neat because it headlines the stories that people
(blogs) are talking about.

There used to be a browser plug-in (Memeorandum Colors) that did an SVD
breakdown of the top 1500-or-so commenting sites and came up with a "line"
from Deep-blue to Deep-red (blue, baby-blue, white, pink, red) and would shade
every commenter according to their "bias".

[https://www.wired.com/2012/04/opinion-baio-site-
bias/](https://www.wired.com/2012/04/opinion-baio-site-bias/)

It was neat! I liked the site a lot more when the add-on worked. I fixed it
for a couple of generations, but FF (which I use) started making it a lot
harder to keep up with.

------
ljf
Really good site. Any plans to add more content or allow user submissions for
links to content?

~~~
mjirv
Thanks! Users can add new RSS feeds already, though it’s a bit hidden. If you
click the “New Collection” Button, there’s a link at the bottom of the pop-up
that says “Don’t see your favorite blog or website? Add it here” which lets
you add a new feed.

------
meow81
Hey nice work! Any plans for responsive/mobile optimized format?

~~~
mjirv
It’s something I’d like to do, since I’ve noticed using it on my phone isn’t
the best experience (though also not the worst-hopefully it’s the same on
other kinds of phones! Let me know if not).

It’ll probably be the next big “feature” I work on.

~~~
chiefalchemist
If you'd like some help, let me know. I don't have a ton of time to spare but
my gut sez you don't need a ton of time :)

Otherwise, kudos! Best of luck.

