
HackRSS - browse HN posts visually - bgraves
http://www.hackrss.com/
======
jinushaun
Visually appealing, but needs longer titles and link to HN comments. I usually
find the comments more enjoyable to read than the source articles.

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Sukotto
I love the recursion when it reaches the "HackRSS - browse HN posts visually"
post in the feed :)

Any chance you could include more of the title text and the link to the
comments?

~~~
felideon
I wonder if with a few more upvotes we'll see the Droste effect.

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doki_pen
A little competition for <http://hn.embed.ly>? Heh. We think rich data makes
much better previews then screenshots. What does HN think about this site vs.
hn.embed.ly?

~~~
Hovertruck
I think this would benefit greatly from some sort of collapse feature. The
nice thing about browsing titles-only ("vanilla") HN is that things that I
don't want to read take up very minimal screen space. With this, I had to work
too hard to scroll past this entry: <http://i.imgur.com/Z9t67.png>

~~~
deno
You can navigate using keyboard (j/k).

~~~
unfasten
You can also fold the article with 'd', and show the top comment with 'c'.
Shift+C opens the comment thread too. Pressing '?' will bring up a box that
lists all the shortcuts:

    
    
       j or →    Select next article
       k or ←    Select previous article
       c         Toggle Hacker News top comment
       shift + c Open Hacker News comments page in a new window
       d         Toggle article content
       enter     Follow the article link in this window
       shift + enter Follow the article link in a new window
       ?         Show this keyboard shortcuts dialog

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mmahemoff
This kind of UI would work well on other HN-like sites, e.g. links to pretty
web designs, but the nature of HN links means the screenshots are almost all
the same thing: an article, a possible image, some ads or links on the side.

Because of the extra space taken up by screenshots, the most important thing -
link title - has to be truncated, and it's not showing vote/comment counts.

It's always good to experiment with UIs, but in this case, I think the
experiment shows the UI is more suited to other kinds of links.

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rokhayakebe
Very well done. I would like to also see this done for various news feed
(maybe most popular links on Twitter/Facebook). EDIT: Happy user of URL2PNG.

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kilian
I think url2png is really cool, but I was a bit pissed when from one day to
the next they went to a subscription model and added sign-up links to all
screenshots. Their fair right, of course, but no fun if you just started using
it.

~~~
url2png
Just send us an email, we'll help you out.

~~~
kilian
Thanks, will do! :)

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mopatches
Here's a search experience for you, same idea: <http://hnsearch.heroku.com/>
:)

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instakill
Quite cool, but the titles shouldn't be cut.

~~~
bgraves
I agree. This is more of a proof-of-concept / demo of the url2png api. If the
post _looks_ interesting to you, just hover over the image thumbnail to view
the title.

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petercooper
I usually enjoy visual browsers like this, but here the previews are too small
for it to click for me. Just to provide a counterexample, this one is pretty
cool and along similar lines: <http://news.peepcode.com/>

~~~
url2png
Ask and ye shall receive bigger screenshots.

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xtacy
Excellent! And I love the browsing and picture in picture recursion: HackRSS
-> HackRSS :-)

~~~
chippy
all I can see is a gray box for the hackrss screenshot

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_ankit_
How is this useful? I agree with bgraves, it is more of a proof-of-concept of
url2png.

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JCB_K
I worked on something similar to this a couple of months back:
<http://hackernewsbot.posterous.com>. Never finished it though.

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plnewman
Cool. I would love to be able to scroll through this using the j and k keys,
like Google Reader or <http://ffffound.com/>.

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orenmazor
very cool. I've always wanted this.

and now that we have this, I realize that the end result is that I will now
end up reading articles that have nice designs. i.e. judging by the cover.

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matmann2001
I love the concept, but I'd rather have the links open in the same window.
Just change your target attributes and I will switch over to this solution
permanently.

~~~
url2png
Agreed and done. Be sure to bookmark it though. ;)

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scrrr
Nicely done but I find the default view much easier to navigate. A JavaScript-
switch between default and with pictures would be nice though.

~~~
bgraves
perhaps a Google Instant Preview style extension where you hover over the
default view link and a screenshot is displayed on the side? That would be a
great browser extension!

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GrooveStomp
Well, I looked. It was not obvious how to view the comments, so I probably
won't ever go back. Sorry, them's the apples.

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micheljansen
Kudos for Droste effect of HackRSS showing the HackRSS post showing HackRSS
showing the HackRSS post.

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ducuboy
Could not fork. The repository's default branch is empty.

~~~
url2png
Somebody let the cat out of the bag a bit early. Watch the repo and you'll be
notified when we commit v1.

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recoiledsnake
Can we have a place that lists all the HN related sites? Or maybe PG can
create such a page and link it at the top/bottom. That would be useful instead
of them getting lost in the old posts and people who haven't seen the posts
missing them.

~~~
wvl
<http://hnresources.com/> is one.

