
What Happened to NewsBlur: A Hacker News Effect Post-Mortem - conesus
http://www.ofbrooklyn.com/2010/11/3/hacker-news-effect-post-mortem/
======
conesus
I tried to show how the onslaught of visitors from my Hacker News link last
week had an effect on both the server (as shown in all of the 7 day munin
graphs), and the project (how I'm responding to feedback and planning the
course of NewsBlur for the next few months).

I'm just so close to NewsBlur being profitable. I am 35 premium user accounts
away (for a total of 80 accounts). Once NewsBlur goes profitable, that's when
the real hard work starts. I would then have support issues, broken features
in edge case browser/OS configs, and the headaches of keeping a server running
for high availabaility, while on a shoe string budget and working super-part-
time. (I write most of NewsBlur on the A train, 35 minutes each way from
Brooklyn to midtown).

~~~
jonbro
I am unclear on how 80*12 dollars is profitable, altho, I guess if you only
worked on this 70 mins a day for a year, I guess that comes out to 4 dollars
an hour, but you must have worked on this on the weekends as well...

I guess you are only factoring the cost of servers, not your own time.

~~~
conesus
Heh, I am not counting my time as a cost. I am merely factoring in the cost of
servers and bandwidth.

3 servers:

    
    
        - App server: 1GB, $40 / month
        - DB server: 512MB, Postgres/MongoDB, $20 / month
        - Task server: 512MB, Celery/RabbitMQ, $20 / month

~~~
theli0nheart
If you're using Rackspace (the costs above are similar to it), you can use
reserved instances on EC2 and save yourself quite a bit of money.

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nikcub
This is a product space/market that many have attempted in the past and
failed. I have probably used a dozen different feed readers in the past 10+
years, and this is the first time that I have signed up for a new product in
this space and been genuinely excited.

Great work. Content publishers will also like this because you aren't
scraping, and you are preserving the original format of their content.

(Bug report - are you auto-detecting feed urls? I put in the domain for my own
site and it didn't find the feed, although it is referenced as a rel. You also
don't have Sydney as a timezone)

~~~
conesus
Sydney has been added.

    
    
        'Australia/Adelaide': '(GMT+09:30) Adelaide',
        'Australia/Darwin': '(GMT+09:30) Darwin',
        'Australia/Brisbane': '(GMT+10:00) Brisbane',
        'Australia/Sydney': '(GMT+10:00) Sydney, Hobart'
    

As for the feed url, i'm not sure why it missed your rel'ed RSS. Email the
site to me and I'll get cracking on it.

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marckremers
This is brilliant, I'm switching over to this right now. Funny enough, Google
reader has just died a quick death since I discovered HN a month ago, but
maybe I'll start using RSS again with News Blur.

Obviously this is beginning stages, but i think the typography and sizing of
UI can still be refined and reduced substantially.

The intro page is the weakest for me. The calligraphic doodle below google
reader feels alien. RSS reading is all about streamlining your reading. I'd
dull down the colours of the UI to the max (think the new itunes monotone
scheme) in order to maximise the individuality of the fed content (which is
the USP of your product).

You only need The Google Reader Sign Up and the How it works shown for the
beginning. The New Improvements feed is not what a first time viewer needs to
see when they put thier virgin eyes on your product.

Seriously impressed!

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apgwoz
I"m so glad you're finally getting some pick up on this. It's really a
fantastic effort! Your openness is also truly appreciated!

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mquander
Not to turn this into NewsBlur tech support, but is there some way to see
recent unread posts from all my feeds, in chronological order, without having
to click around on the left sidebar?

That is basically my single mode of operation in Google Reader. I'm sort of
surprised that I can't do it trivially because I thought that everyone used
RSS readers that way.

Other than that, the UI is pleasant, though.

~~~
conesus
It's river of news and it's slated for next month. I wasn't going to implement
this until recently, when a user very persuasively convinced me to make this a
priority. I thought it was a workflow that didn't fit in with the rest of
NewsBlur. He thought it was a necessary feature for any hard-core user.

Everybody reads RSS differently, and I am only trying to pleasure a few groups
for now. But river of news is one of the highest ticket priorities. Up there
with the iPhone app (which is 60% done), fixing misbehaving feeds, and fixing
the many Chrome bugs.

~~~
petercooper
Yeah, I was figuring out how to do this as it's the way I read everything
(Twitter, Google Reader, Facebook).. rather than visit sources one by one
(which is what I'm trying to move away from for sites I like the design of -
if NewsBlur can combine that "site's own pages" effect with the river benefit,
a big win for me).

One thing I can't figure out, though, is why many feeds do not show the "real"
page for the item. Instead, it reverts back to just using the feed or showing
the _front page_ of the blog in question, even though the URL is clearly in
there. When I'm on "Original" I'd just like to see the URL for the item on the
right without having to open it in a new tab/window. Or is this a bug?

~~~
conesus
It's a different use case. If you want, you can click on links in the original
site, but then you are no longer on newsblur.com. The way i am able to take
over the original site is through a proxy.

What your describing is that every link shows it's original site endpoint,
which means reading every story would require a separate page load. Instead, I
just consolidated the front page, and if you want the story content as it
appears in the feed, then there's the Feed view (and you can go back and forth
between them with the left and right arrow keys).

Otherwise, it's a slow process to load all of those stories one-by-one.

~~~
petercooper
Aha, I thought it was just an IFRAME (and then thought the "arrow" at the side
was rather clever and I'd need to go see how you pulled that off ;-)).

Oh well, that's a shame. One of the initial big wins (in my head) was that I
like to see the original design of the item rather than the plain feed version
(handy for these individually designed blog posts nowadays) but without
opening 101 tabs over my session. This still works fine in NB for blogs where
all the posts are held on the front page a while, it seems, but just not those
that nest things on individual post pages I guess. (Hurrah for you open
sourcing it though!)

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hfinney
It's refreshing to read an article all about the service you're providing to
your customers and not your percent conversions or CPM. So many of the
entrepreneurs here are all about the money rather than the product.

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joakin
Hey just one small but really noticeable improvement:

When you change feed, and the "iframe"(or whatever it is) is loading the next
page, you should fadeout the old one, and maybe (if possible) put a loading
gif or similar until load completion.

That would make the interface far more responsive, since when i was clicking
feeds to test, sometimes i didnt notice if the click was doing something or
not, and that produces frustration along with multiple clicks (unnecesary work
overload)

Cool app anyway! Wish you the best :)

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christopherslee
Great job. Like other posters have said, this to me seems so new and
innovative in an otherwise commoditized space.

Is it intentional that there's such a big whitespace gap on the 'home' page?
(Chrome 7, OS X 10.6)

[http://img.skitch.com/20101104-n3yd14f7s73ddkdxaqxyuda5hr.jp...](http://img.skitch.com/20101104-n3yd14f7s73ddkdxaqxyuda5hr.jpg)

I really hope, and believe, this will replace my use of google reader, which I
have found to be absolutely painful to use. I wish google products had more
inspiring interfaces.

I'd love to talk to you about your decision to open-source it sometime.

Keep up the good work.

~~~
conesus
Yes, that whitespace is intentional. I know, it's a bit disconcerting because
nobodyd oes it that way. I _may_ fill it with dashboard style analytics and
graphs. But that's a ways away for now.

The focus is on the sites. The logo only shows up when you first go to
newsblur.com. That's also intentional. Why do you need to see the logo as
you're reading your sites?

As for why I went open-source, I figure that the good will that comes from
being open-source will help me obtain my #1 top priority: meeting future co-
founders. NewsBlur is my public resume. Making it profitable is priority #2.
Well, it can easily be profitable if folks are buying premium accounts and not
bothering to host everything on their own servers. Seems to be working out
pretty well, so far.

~~~
smharris65
This is a cool project and really great that it's open source, since I want to
learn more about Django, but that whitespace really stopped me with I first
loaded the site. I spent several minutes thinking it must be a CSS error. It
made me wonder if there was a layout problem, and how did the developer miss
this. So maybe it's at least visually distracting, which takes focus away from
all the good work done on the site.

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cemregr
This is the best premium account upsell ever. I raise my hat, and giggle.
Screenshot: <http://cl.ly/303349b79ded3049b733>

~~~
conesus
Hah, thanks. She's actually blind, hence why her eyes are bigger than normal.
But she's a beagle, so if you know beagles, you know that they couldn't care
less about their eyes. It's all nose for them. On walks I have to remind her
that she's about to bump right into a tree.

And that truck for an icon? It's for all the food I have to truck in to feed
her. Har har.

------
Aykroyd
Wow. Impressive story and an impressive site. Also, thanks for all the details
on how your site handled the load. It's a great write-up. Best of luck!

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dasil003
I've been spending too much time on HN and not enough on RSS. Which captures
the most interesting high-leve tech stuff, but doesn't keep my in all the
loops I want to be in, and I have Google Reader fatigue, so I think I'll give
this a serious look.

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mcarrano
Hey Samuel, I met you at the Hackers and Founders meet up in NY a week ago. I
remember you telling me about Newsblur and so I took a look at it and I am
very impressed and will continue to use it.

All the best to you and Newsblur

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norswap
This is nice, too bad I hadn't heard of it before. A feature I'm really
missing is a page with all new items (eventually sorted by "goodness").

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raheemm
Did you do the UI and graphic design as well?

~~~
conesus
Yes, I did make the UI. Uhh, as for graphics, I use Silk icons. Besides that,
I don't think I use any graphics. I'm very big on thinking about design, but I
do not for the life of me know how to draw.

I consider my work as the epitome of the "Design is not just the look" ethos.
I spend what little free time I do have thinking about the flow for all the
little parts of NewsBlur.

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candre717
This is good news. And, to think, your title was pepping me for another failed
startup write-up.

