
Show HN: newsola - top news stories at a glance - kirchhoff
http://www.newsola.com
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nuttendorfer
Was instantly reminded of this: <http://newsmap.jp/>

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drats
Seems to be a very direct clone, down to the colours, but using a different
back-end system.

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etcet
It's a different front-end too (JS instead of Flash). But the author not even
mentioning Newsmap in the about is low.

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kirchhoff
You're right, that was an error on my part. I have added a new comment.

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PeterWhittaker
My first few reactions were "why can't I X" only to discover I could in fact
X: Select my country, eliminate categories, etc. The only thing left is to
perhaps rearrange the categories (business, then national, then world, e.g.,
but that's a quibble).

Zooming the page increases/decreases the number of stories per category, which
is quite cool (if perhaps counter-intuitive, but OK). But would it be possible
to have an absolute "no smaller than" minimum size for the menu? (I've zoomed
in a few times via "ctrl -" and the menu bar is now unreadably small.)

On a related note, as I zoom in, I get more stories, but the font for existing
stories remains the same as before the zoom, with their blocks occupying
roughly the same amount of screen space as before the zoom; this means that
newly added stories are in tiny blocks and tiny fonts: as I zoom, new stories
become unreadably small.

It would be good to have an absolute "no smaller than" minimum for newly added
stories as well, scaling down the size of existing stories; I'm OK with
different font sizes for relative importance, but existing stories should
decrease in size to accommodate new stories as I zoom to add more.

EDIT -- It would also be nice to be able to close particular boxes (display an
X in the top right corner when I hover there?) and have that story replaced
with another from that category.

(And it would be waaaay cool if there was some way to mark stories as seen and
to not display them again... ...when I revisit the page, I only see things new
since the last time, or not displayed the last time. That way, the page is
always new. No idea how to do this without a server/account on your end, but
it could be cool....)

Cool app. I am adding it to my regularly checked folder of news sites.

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kirchhoff
I had not considered zoom functionality at all. I'm not sure that it's
possible to specify that an element shouldn't be resized (the menu), I'll have
to investigate.

Your suggestions are great, I will try to implement them, thanks.

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PeterWhittaker
The more I use newsola, the more I like it. Do you have a donation page? I
will gladly cough up $$ for features I like.

I'd like to be able to get the unique union of two feeds, i.e., the union of

www.newsola.com/#/ca/tc

and

www.newsola.com/#/us/tc

without any duplicates.

That way, I would have three bookmarks:

<http://www.newsola.com/#/ca/w,n,b> \- my default Canada-centric news page

<http://www.newsola.com/#/ca/tc/UNION/#/us/tc> \- for tech

www.newsola.com/#/ca/s/PLUS/#/ca/e/UNION/#/us/e - for sports and entertainment
(emphasis on CDN sport, i.e., more hockey, less baseball, with US and CA
entertainment - in fact, I could add Britain too, e.g., to keep up with
Blake's 7 and Red Dwarf news).

Make any sense? Not sure how this might work, but I'll play PHB and throw
impossible features at you as a challenge! :->

(I'm not sure why "Romney, Santorum battle in Michigan" is such a large
business item in my CA/B feed, but OK, I can live with that... :->)

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kirchhoff
Combining multiple countries shouldn't be a problem, but I'll have to modify
the UI a bit.

Sports subcategories I've looked at as well, but it starts to get messy and I
wanted to keep everything simple.

I don't think I could accept donations, but I'll try to add those features
when I have time!

Thanks

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kirchhoff
I should mention that this is essentially a clone of the excellent NewsMap
(www.newsmap.jp), but written in JS instead of Flash.

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LefterisJP
Looks nice, I would recommend it to my friends for a quick glance of news. But
I would like to bring the attention of the author to the comment of
nuttendorfer. The two sites seem very similar and you should either mention it
somewhere, or try to differentiate yours in the design part

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kirchhoff
I have added a comment reflecting this.

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rshigeta
i like the design - i don't think the animation adds much though. For all the
stuff that's going on in the world and how the other aggregators behave, i
think that just 5-6 stories showing up is not enough when I click sometimes.
Your categories are a little weak "Lin" shows up in news of the World, Apple
shows up in National. Keep tweaking - there is definitely room for a better
news aggregator and being able to easily switch to other national editions is
great!

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swah
How do you decide which stories are more important? Would be interesting if
you let users curate and present their own newsola frontpages.

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kirchhoff
The stories are taken from Google News who themselves aggregrate stories from
news sources. The "importance" is defined by the number of media outlets
covering a particular story.

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miles_matthias
I'd like it more if apple-mobile-web-app-capable was set. But nice work!

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kirchhoff
I experimented with that, but if you click a link from the "app" it loads the
browser, with no easy way back to the app.

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kirchhoff
Should work cross browser / device. Any comments would be welcomed.

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MichaelApproved
On iPhone, when I click about, the contact section is cut off.

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vixen99
Colorful!

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pghimire
Looks awesome. How are you seeding the stories?

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kirchhoff
They are taken from the Google News RSS feeds.

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PeterWhittaker
Any chance of integrating the "Top Stories" section?

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kirchhoff
Indeed - it is on my todo list.

