

Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news - jlft
http://morningreader.com

======
jcr
1.) You never set background-color. Not setting background-color results in
unintended consequences on any browser configured to have a default other than
the expected white background. A good example in your case is visited links
become grey on grey (assuming a browser with grey default background).

2\. You need to be cautious of and properly handle notorious webspam/blogspam
regurgitation sites like "recode.net":

"Wal-Mart Scammed Into Selling PlayStation 4 for $90"
[http://recode.net/2014/11/19/wal-mart-scammed-into-
selling-p...](http://recode.net/2014/11/19/wal-mart-scammed-into-selling-
playstation-4-for-90/)

Which leads to:

[http://www.cnbc.com/id/102197050](http://www.cnbc.com/id/102197050)

Which leads to:

[http://consumerist.com/2014/11/18/terrible-people-create-
fak...](http://consumerist.com/2014/11/18/terrible-people-create-fake-amazon-
pages-convince-walmart-to-price-match-them/)

Which leads to:

[http://kotaku.com/people-are-scamming-walmart-with-bogus-
che...](http://kotaku.com/people-are-scamming-walmart-with-bogus-cheap-
ps4-listin-1660150939)

Finding the original source can be a PITA, but it's still much better than
rewarding spam regurgitation sites with traffic.

3.) Having a "sign in" icon link on every single article listing looks odd. Is
it the default replacement for some voting mechanism that's only available to
logged-in users?

4.) Grey text on a white background is common fare on the web (including hn)
to de-emphasize some text, but it's a poor design decision in terms of
accessibility. People with even minor visual impairments (i.e. poor vision)
have difficulty reading grey text on white backgrounds.

All in all, it looks interesting. Good Luck With It!

~~~
jlft
1\. Got it. We'll set a background color in the body.

2\. I agree. We will think about ways to handle it. As a last resort we may
blacklist those kind of publishers.

3\. Sign in is only needed to favorite stories (using the little bookmark icon
below each line). I agree that it is not clear what the sign in is for, we
will fix that.

4\. Yup, we will increase the contrast a little.

Thanks for the feedaback!

~~~
jcr
On #2, using binary block/allow lists for sites works, but long term, it can
be problematic in the sense of maintenance effort (i.e. _your time_ ;). A less
common but more interesting approach is to use site-based weighting. There
will still be some manual wrangling involved, but you might be able to
automate some of it eventually (analysis of content on the site, dns, linked-
from analysis, google page-rank lookup, etc.)

With site-based weighting, you can still block with a threshold, but you gain
the benefit of adjusting rankings based on past/known site quality, and the
advantage of setting with a "default weight" for unknown sites you've never
seen before.

It's really just a different approach that you might want to consider to
handle the webspam/blogspam problem.

~~~
jlft
We already have mechanisms like weighting, whitelisting, blacklisting, etc. in
place. We generally trust a good quality source (site domain) to produce good
quality content, but there are exceptions. Since our popularity scoring
algorithm relies heavily on social signals, it trusts the crowd to reward good
content, and ultimately good content will rank higher.

------
jasonlfunk
I'm curious why you chose the categories that you did. Why focus on
business/tech instead of having a broader focus on more mainstream current
event news?

~~~
jlft
We decided to start with just a few topics that we are relatively familar with
to get a sense of the quality of the curation. We plan to expand to broader
and more mainstream topics in the future.

------
hackuser
The quality of the curation, at least for my taste and at least at this
moment, is exceptional. Maybe the best algorithmic curation I've seen.

I'm curious what inspired you. There are many algorithmically curated news
feeds; why add another? Is it because you believe your algorithm is a leap
forward? Elsewhere you say it's mostly the same one used by HN.

Regardless, it works well for me. Thank you!

~~~
jlft
> The quality of the curation, at least for my taste and at least at this
> moment, is exceptional. Maybe the best algorithmic curation I've seen.

Glad you liked it, thanks!

> There are many algorithmically curated news feeds; why add another? Is it
> because you believe your algorithm is a leap forward? Elsewhere you say it's
> mostly the same one used by HN.

There are many attempts at "personalized news". Also some niche "community
curated" news (influenced by HN and Reddit). And some mostly algorithmic, like
the new Digg and Techmeme. We fit on this third group, and are just
experimenting to see what we can come up with quality wise.

------
tmmm
Where and how do you get your news? How do you order them? And why only 30 in
each category?

Other than that, nice design. Bookmarked, will see. Btw, I guess comments
would be nice.

~~~
jlft
> Where and how do you get your news? How do you order them?

We get the news via data feeds like RSS and social networks. The ranking
algorithm is similar to the HN one
([http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574](http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574)), but
instead of upvotes it uses our popularity score system.

> And why only 30 in each category?

In the future we may add mechanisms to let users browse more links, like a
'Show more' button below the links list, or an Archive section.

> Other than that, nice design. Bookmarked, will see. Btw, I guess comments
> would be nice.

Thanks!

------
irongeek
I would consider following the site if categories had RSS feeds.

~~~
jlft
We're considering that. Would you prefer a daily digest with the top x
stories, or a stream of hourly posts?

~~~
irongeek
Personally I would offer both. I would likely use the stream of hourly posts.

------
desireco42
Thank you for making this, this is exactly what I ever wanted to have and
started few times making and did a half assed effort. So thank you. Exactly
what I need. Perfect.

~~~
jlft
Glad you liked it! Thanks!

------
iqonik
When you add more topics, I would pay for API access to get an hourly list of
popular stories in each topic. If this is ever added please let me know :-)

~~~
jlft
We're thinking about doing at least daily digests – with the top x stories of
the last 24 hours – for each topic, via email and/or RSS. Thanks for your
suggestion!

~~~
iqonik
If you offer RSS I wouldn't have to pay (I assume) - if you had an API I would
use it for commercial use.

------
Gonzih
Categories are too generic in my opinion. I would love to have smaller
categories like "programming", "unix" and etc.

~~~
jlft
Thanks for your suggestion! We'll add more topics in the future.

------
avyfain
Where does your social network data come from? Twitter? Does the popularity
depend on how many people are sharing the links?

------
mariusmg
I did something similar at [http://yaxero.com](http://yaxero.com)

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plingamp
I wish you could combine topics, example: Design + Tech News.

------
JoshTriplett
Do you plan to offer custom topics or search in the future?

~~~
jlft
Not sure yet, but we may do something in that direction in the future.

------
joelthelion
How do you define "relevance"?

~~~
jlft
It could be "popularity" or "trending factor" instead. Basically the same way
stories are ranked on HN
([http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574](http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574)), but
instead of upvotes it uses our popularity score system.

------
ddebernardy
How are the stories selected?

~~~
jlft
The stories are curated and ranked by an algorithm. We give it a list of
publishers, and it does most the work, however sometimes a little human
moderation is still needed for more clean, on-topic results. The newest and
most popular stories appear at the top, like on Hacker News (we use a similar
ranking algorithm). To measure the popularity of the stories, the algorithm
uses social signals.

~~~
ddebernardy
I think I'd echo what jcr said: it needs an additional human layer, to nail
down the original source of articles. Else it's just another random aggregator
site with a random set of sources, however pretty.

~~~
jlft
The algorithm is still a work in progress. We are constantly tweaking it to
make it more autonomous and better at selecting stories. Thanks!

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techmaddy
Good one.

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adaam2
Good looking site!

