
Readspike – Simple news aggregator - lainon
https://readspike.com/
======
felixthehat
Author here – I can't believe my humble little pet project has made it to the
hackernews front page!

I cobbled it together for myself 5 years ago to aggregate my favourite news
rss feeds. I'd be amazed if the server holds up! Feel free to ask any
questions.

~~~
jszymborski
Here's a souvenir, if you haven't grabbed it yourself :P

[https://i.imgur.com/yMhNySc.png](https://i.imgur.com/yMhNySc.png)

~~~
felixthehat
BoingBoing too! What a lovely surprise, thanks

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weego
I can't stare at white text on black with no visual hierarchy and get anything
useful from it without really forcing myself to concentrate hard. Which is
exactly the opposite of what I want from an aggregator.

~~~
felixthehat
I used to have a day/night mode but my analytics said 0 people used it, so I
removed it to reduce cruft. Maybe I should put it back!

~~~
strict9
perhaps the problem was that the control wasn't obvious. agreed, can't use it
with white text on black background.

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indescions_2017
I prefer the "river" style layouts as well.

Two examples for financial news that are quite usable:

[http://www.marketwatch.com/newsviewer](http://www.marketwatch.com/newsviewer)

[http://cmwire.com/](http://cmwire.com/)

For the MarketWatch site, link is just to their own in-house write-up, but you
have the option to mouse over and bring up stock charts, etc. On CMWire, lag
in updates is every three minutes or so, making it very timely.

Mobile-wise, HN News remains my go-to reading experience ;)

~~~
libertyEQ
Since you mentioned MarketWatch and river of news, I think these folks do a
good job:

[http://seekingalpha.com/market-news/all](http://seekingalpha.com/market-
news/all)

However, it does seem unnecessarily javascript-heavy when we are talking text,
and it aggressively auto-reloads (sometimes when I'm in the midst of
reading!). There seems to be a usability mismatch among people that use 1
browser with one tab open vs. people that utilize multiple browsers and/or
multiple tabs.

edit: I, personally, use multiple browsers, some with multiple windows, and
some of those windows with 5-60 tabs (i.e. HN). Graceful degradation used to
be a concept highly regarded among developers that addressed these usage
scenarios, but now we cater to the lowest common denominator only.

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geraldbauer
FYI: If you want to build your own little news aggreator page or sites, try
the open source pluto planet tool (gem/library) [1] it incl. a top theme [2],
for example. Happy planet. Cheers. [1]
[http://feedreader.github.io](http://feedreader.github.io) [2]
[https://github.com/planet-templates/planet-top](https://github.com/planet-
templates/planet-top)

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disease
Nice to see that other people besides me like having their news presented this
way. I will be launching my own iGoogle clone in the next couple of months. It
will be easy to create and move around different feeds and there will be tabs
as well - although I call them pages in my app. I built it using
React/MobX/TypeScript.

~~~
felixthehat
Yeah I think I made it when iGoogle and google reader died, I’ll not kill it
off like they did

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CharlesDodgson
I love this, I like how it's not image heavy. It also seems to aggregate all
the sites I like to read :)

I really like the responsive multi-column, as someone who increases the text
on webpages all the time , i find a lot of a more shinier things out there
don't like 150%, your site scales nicely.

[https://imgur.com/BPc1gvx](https://imgur.com/BPc1gvx)

What I would love would be a section at the top that just has all the news
feeds, merged, in reverse chronological order.

~~~
felixthehat
Thanks Charles! Speed was my main goal, it should load in well under a second.
Will look into the merged idea

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benji13
It seems that this is the source for it:
[https://github.com/kultus/ReadSpike](https://github.com/kultus/ReadSpike)

~~~
tyingq
I guess it's the admin interface, so perhaps not public facing. But, uh, lots
of SQL injection issues...

[https://github.com/kultus/ReadSpike/blob/master/crud2/index....](https://github.com/kultus/ReadSpike/blob/master/crud2/index.php)

~~~
mrinterweb
Just had flashbacks to writing PHP. Considering this is still an idiomatic
style of writing PHP speaks to the problems of the language. That SQL
injection venerability is also plain as day.

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alkonaut
Great, now add some more predefined pages (or allow customizing) and let me
invert the colors and I'm good to go!

~~~
Raphmedia
If you want to quickly invert the colors, simply paste this in a custom
Stylish userstyle :

html { filter: invert(100%); } img,svg{ filter: invert(100%); } body {
background: white; }

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SAI_Peregrinus
I hate multi-column layouts. The only reason they exist is to provide a narrow
text width (easy to read) on a wide page without wasting tons of paper.
Scrollbars exist, there is no good reason to have a multi-column layout for an
electronic document.

There also doesn't seem to be any way to customize which RSS feeds are shown.
That means I'd still need a second reader for anything not included (and have
feeds I'm not interested in). That makes it even more useless.

This feels like the author's personal project. The feed categories are quite
specific (London & Brighton) and fixed. I'm sure it's just what they want, but
it's not exactly a general purpose news aggregator.

~~~
nxsynonym
I disagree about muli-column layouts, as I tend to like them. I think it just
comes down to preference. The best solution would be to offer multiple views
based on user preference.

The rest is spot on though. A little too specific and un-changeable for my
personal use.

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
Multi-columns work if you don't have to scroll to read the info as well. If
you can get to the bottom of the column without scrolling (like on a printed
page) it's fine. If you have to scroll they're horrid. You wouldn't print a
book with a multi-column layout where each column continues through to the end
of the chapter, and then you have to turn back to the start to read the next
column. Yet people do it with digital documents all the damn time.

------
aq3cn
I am already used to this view, credit goes to android and web app of feedly.
How about showing trending youtube videos. By the way, it is awesome. Loving
it. It would have been great if I could personalise the feeds with my opml
file.

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Raphmedia
Suggestion : Let me click on a source to front it on the top of the website.
Simply store it in a cookie or localstorage. Even better, let me drag-drop to
reorder or mute sites I'm not interested in seeing.

~~~
felixthehat
I should make a public trello board, good suggestions!

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wmeredith
Looks like a dumbed down version of [http://alltop.com/](http://alltop.com/)

How is this on the front page?

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CaptainQuirk
Great website. A few wishes :

Would love to have a PWA for it. Web platform daily doesn't work anymore. You
could parse the content of the weekly issues in
[https://github.com/simevidas/webplatformnews-
weekly/tree/mas...](https://github.com/simevidas/webplatformnews-
weekly/tree/master/issues)

~~~
felixthehat
Thanks! replaced it with developers.google.com/web

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_joel
A simple news aggregator for someone, just not for your news

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raresp
I'm sorry but this website doesn't provide some innovative news feed, all I
can find here is a simple RSS reader.

In my opinion this post shouldn't be on the front page. I guess it's all about
the author's karma (or other users who upvotedt it).

~~~
earlyriser
Maybe it's karma powered, but yeah I feel a bit sad about this on the
frontpage, not because I don't see the merit of it, but because I've tried to
promote my feed that was tracking hundred of startup blogs and tech giants,
and I was just able to get like 4 points in the 3 occasions I put it on Show
HN. It's already water over the bridge and it's not tracking any more news,
but anyway, sorry for this mini rant.

~~~
felixthehat
Readspike has been live for 5 years with only a handful of regular visitors,
this is totally out of the blue for me! No idea who submitted it, I thought my
site had errored when I saw it listed on itself

~~~
raresp
Ok, sorry for my comment.

