

A Google Reader Replacement written in Haskell and Ur - Rickasaurus
https://bazqux.com/

======
Phlogistique
Author: please consider open-sourcing your code. NewsBlur and FeedHQ do it and
they are profitable. Plus a huge open source Haskell+Ur exemple would be a
very good thing for the community. I'm more inclined to choose FeedHQ or
NewsBlur as my Google Reader replacement of choice because I know it will be
possible to use them even if the authors don't want to work on it anymore.

~~~
bhoung
I believe this is it, though github is down for me now so I can't really tell.

[https://github.com/bazqux](https://github.com/bazqux)

~~~
toni
That's only API docs and some forked Haskell libraries. You can't find source
code of the actual app there.

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MartinMond
I just signed up and this is the best Reader replacement I've seen so far.

Someone actually thought through what an evolution of Reader should be. It can
subscribe to non-RSS pages like Facebook public pages or Google+ pages. If the
feed only contains teasers it scrapes the pages to get at the the full text
and displays that inline. This seems to be a Reader replacement by an actual
former Reader user.

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nakedrobot2
This does look excellent. I look forward to seeing how well it works on
mobile. I wonder if there is any native ios / android implementation in the
works? I would happily pay for both!

But the name? How am I supposed to pronounce it? I'm sorry to say this, but a
name like this could be a serious impediment to getting widespread adoption.
It's not as bad as calling it something like "flaming purple penis of death"
but it's not that far off.

~~~
shurane
It's from the sequence of ["foo","bar","baz","qux", "quux", ...]. More info at
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable#English](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable#English)

Doesn't sound like a great name, but whatever. It's a placeholder at least.

~~~
tome
I had no idea "qux" came before "quux". How embarrassing. It's like counting
"one, two, three, five".

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Nux
Nice, but I don't see a "download" link. Without the ability to run my own,
how can I be sure this will not go the way of the "Google reader"? Especially
being a "one man show".

~~~
mheiler
You never know. But you can reduce the likelihood for that to happen by paying
for it.

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ams6110
I'm not interested in news reader apps but I had never heard of Ur/Web
before... I'm glad that was mentioned in the title as it's not obvious from
the site; always nice to hear about new frameworks.

~~~
Rickasaurus
Ur is a really cool language from Adam Chlipala of MIT. It has a bunch of
novel language features that help you write correct web code.

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Locke1689
I would _love_ to hear more about your Ur/Web experience (if you are the
author Rickasaurus?).

~~~
doublec
I'm not the author but have written a couple of production web applications
using Ur/Web and have found it pretty nice. The enforced purity took a little
getting used too. If an error occurs during a request all side effecting
changes during that request are rolled back. This is nice for the database
side of things but dealing with other interfaces with the world (eg. payments,
sending mail) required some work arounds. Nothing impossible to deal with
though.

The FFI of Ur/Web is low level and easy to use. This made interfacing with
existing C routines easy. When I couldn't work out how to do something in Ur,
I just wrote it in C (well, actually I wrote it in ATS which compiles to C)
and called it from Ur.

I did have some interesting issues in an application that had fairly heavy
load. If one transaction is in process and it relies on data that gets changed
in another transaction then one of them is rolled back and retried once the
other has succeeded. Under very heavy load, where transactions required some
semi-global state in the database, and all those transactions modified that
state then these rollbacks would happen a lot and cause performance issues.
Fixed with better data design in the app of course to avoid the contention on
the global state.

All in all though Ur/Web has held up very well for me and makes it pretty
quick to put things together.

~~~
yfefyf
Seems that these problems are Clojure's selling points.

~~~
chrisdone
Maybe so, but Closure and Ur/Web are apples and oranges. The selling points of
Ur/Web are not present in Clojure.

------
msoad
The language my RSS reader in written in is not important for me.

~~~
Nekorosu
I can just hope English language'll get some more importance in your life. :)

~~~
msoad
That's offensive. I'm trying my best speaking in YOUR language

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jcartledge
Can I suggest mentioning mobile apps which can sync with BazQux on the landing
page? I left quickly because it didn't appear there were any options for
mobile/device sync, but then I saw this on the feedbin landing page (which has
a great App Support section):

> Mr. Reader is a RSS News Reader for your iPad that synchronizes with
> Feedbin, Feedly, __BazQux Reader __, FeedHQ, Feed Wrangler and Fever.

~~~
vshabanov
Had no time to fix landing page )

------
kayloos
I have a really good impression of the site, and might use it as my feed
reader.

One question: Do people really want to pay for a feed reader? On one hand the
price is low compared to what we use on day-to-day goods, but I'm curious as
to whether a feed reader is something that the average hacker would pay for.

~~~
vshabanov
From what I see people pay for a feed readers. Especially after Google decided
to close one well known free RSS reader.

------
autotravis
"Start your free trial today!"

and no pricing info...

~~~
MartinMond
From the FAQ: You can choose any price you want from $9 to $29 annually.

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jay_kyburz
hey.. so.. the reason I stopped using Google Reader was that many of the feeds
I was subscribed to would only include the first few paragraphs of the blog
entry forcing me to click through to the blog anyhow. (This is what killed RSS
for me)

Is there a reader that will just open the web page that the feed item links to
rather than the text of the feed?

~~~
dmbass
Check out Newsblur's story view (or text view if you don't want the site's
hideous styling).

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krfantasy
Amazing! First time I saw Haskell-based website. But this is not free, I'm
sad.

~~~
tel
Take a look at [https://www.fpcomplete.com/](https://www.fpcomplete.com/).
They're trying to push the edge of Haskell web dev commercialization.

~~~
krfantasy
thanks!

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ForFreedom
This looks good

