
Show HN: my personal news reader, now public - SkimFeed.com  - brador
http://skimfeed.com/
======
whalesalad
I love the comment in the top of your source:

<!-- THIS IS NOT THE PLACE TO BE LEARNING HTML, CSS OR JAVASCRIPT. THIS CODE
IS OF EXCEPTIONALLY POOR QUALITY. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. :NOTE TO SELF: INSERT
ASCII WARNING TRIANGLE FROM 4CHAN HERE TO GIVE READERS THE HIEBBY-JIEBIES:
\-->

------
mike-cardwell
You have a few escaping issues, that Firefox nicely hi-lights if you view the
source. For example, if the title of an article contains a ", you don't quote
it, so in the html you end up with attributes like this:

    
    
      title="something "something else""
    

You also don't escape ampersands. Eg:

    
    
      <a href="http://example.com/foo?x=1&y=2">x & y</a>
    

Should be:

    
    
      <a href="http://example.com/foo?x=1&amp;y=2">x &amp; y</a>
    

I imagine there is a more general issue with a lack of escaping, but these are
just a couple of examples I found.

~~~
brador
I saw these issues last night but couldn't work out what was causing them.
Thanks for the explanations Mike, added to todo.

Update: Fixed. I think, but those &amp; are still showing up red in source.

------
brador
Backstory: I built this last year and forgot all about it. Re-discovered it on
my junk server last month and I've been using it ever since.

Polished overnight and now released to the lions den.

Take a look, feedback welcome. What do you think?

~~~
state
Looks nice! Somehow we've been thinking about similar things —
<https://www.sharingstate.com/office/News>

------
MatthewPhillips
I like it. May I suggest getting rid of the fixed social sharing buttons? The
ones at the bottom do the job well enough. I find the top ones a little bit
distracting. Good font choice.

------
k-mcgrady
I really like this, it makes skimming the major news sites very easy. It looks
like a quick way to view the news in the morning. I could probably scan all
those and open the ones I want to read in under a minute. The only thing I
would change is the social buttons at the top but from the other comments I
can see you're going to remove them.

Nice work.

------
sa1f
I used jimmyr.com all these years. Might as well switch to this. Hate those
fixed social buttons though.

~~~
brador
The fixed socials are only on for today, I've made a note to remove them.

Good to have you on board, Let me know if there's any feeds you'd like added.

------
tcgore
I absolutely love this - now my new homepage. This is a very pleasant way to
present this to my eyes. Even more importantly, it loads 'instantly', which is
extremely important for a go-to/default site. In my opinion, drudgereport's
popularity owes a lot to this combination of easy to absorb and quick loading
times.

If I could make a suggestion - I would be interested in seeing a list of
popularity based on clicks/time. To preserve the layout, you could only load
it as a side column if the screen was wide enough to display more than 3
columns.

I actually think a site like this could turn into a one-man cash cow if you
can get it to be a default site visited multiple times each day.

------
adamcollingburn
Great tool, I'd maybe change font and line-height to make for easier reading
-> <http://i.imgur.com/7PSvi.png>

------
seshagiric
Nice work and thanks for sharing.

If you can add hyperlinks to each title, it will be helpful (e.g clicking on
"Make" should take me to make.com).

------
SnaKeZ
It's like <http://www.popurls.com>: really good aggregator.

------
nollidge
This is pretty good. Currently I use NetVibes, which is buggy and actually TOO
customizable. I like the strict grid layout.

If you made this a service, here's what would make me switch:

\- customizable feeds (kind of obvious I guess)

\- ability to mark items as read/unread (link color is not enough - I want to
skip some items, or just read them all from the blog itself without clicking
individual items)

\- have individual feed header be a link to the feed's main page (it's the
<link> element in RSS) \- customize number of items per feed (e.g. I'd want
more items for feeds which update frequently)

Nice to haves:

\- tabs (I have LOTS of feeds - would be easier to manage instead of long
scrolling)

\- along with using the <link> element above, ability to override this,
because I've noticed lots of feeds that don't set it properly (link to the
domain root instead of the blog root, e.g.)

~~~
RoadRunner_23
I currently use netvibes too. to customize rss feeds.. i use Yahoo Pipes. You
can provide bunch of feeds to pipes, then add custom filters, sorts, terms and
generate a custom RSS address. Add this address to netvibes.

and with this process, you will hardly ever visit any of the homepages except
netvibes.

Nice project though.

------
npguy
Thanks for the list. I have an organized list here, at <http://talll.com>. I
have tried to place the reading list under various groups - I thought this
might be relevant to this discussion.

------
krigath
Although I like the idea, I personally prefer Pulse.me. It has pictures and
resized articles according to their significance.

Screenshot: <http://i.imgur.com/W1NKw.png>

~~~
jpwagner
Pulse looks like a neat idea, but I can't stand the layout. Where should my
eyes go?

I'm a big fan of "significance", "buzz", and "personalization" in theory, but
I find it easier to skim some text myself.

~~~
krigath
Re: "Where should my eyes go?"

I find that I can skim more easily with a few images that provide additional
visual cues other than those of textual information. Pictures require a
different visual focus, and might allow me to focus on the "bigger picture"
(e.g. whether it is coming from WSJ), or "smaller picture" (i.e. more specific
examples).

Additionally, I like that you can mix the sources together, with not too much
of anything; instead emphasising a more holistic view.

~~~
brador
Yes, you can skim more easily with images, but those images are leading your
eyes to what? The best articles or just a random article with images? I say
it's the second one.

I'd argue title words are much better at showcasing an articles potential
value than a stock image of a carrot.

------
prakashk
TheNextWeb appears twice on the page: first one after Mashable, and second
after Geek. But, only the first four items are same in both lists. Fetched
from different feed URLs?

Others have already said it, but I will say it again. Please remove the share
buttons on top. On my phone (Firefox Mobile on G2), the share buttons keep
scrolling down along with the content. In addition to taking up valuable
screen space, it is quite annoying as it is quite jumpy and hides the actual
content.

------
mathewsimonton
Cool stuff!

I like brief little news feeds like this. They get to the point, there's not
clutter with distracting pictures, etc. It's simple and all that's necessary.

On my computers I have Rainmeter installed and I link some general Google news
feeds right onto my desktop: <http://i.imgur.com/76Oc8.png> . I wish I had
more space though in my upper-right corner, could show more full headlines. A
dual-monitor setup would probably be best...

------
jeffehobbs
This project is the opposite of this project: <http://www.frequency-
decoder.com/demo/slabText/>

------
enraged_camel
Excellent design. Within 5 seconds of visiting your site, I understood what it
does and how it would be useful to me, and bookmarked it.

------
ThomPete
May i suggest line-height: 160%

I know it will take away a few links from the viewarea but you will be able to
read them faster IMHO.

~~~
brador
How did you come to the 160% figure? Golden triangle?

~~~
ThomPete
Experience :)

~~~
brador
Done.

------
brianritchie
Absolutely love it. Thanks for the share.

------
dtnguyen1
I think it would be worth adding some way to filter/hide the sources. I like
the idea of the whole thing, especially the simplicity, but I don't read
nearly as many news sources as you, so it makes it kind of inconvenient to
scroll/search through the whole thing to find the sites I am looking for

------
rocky1138
It's neat, but I find things more useful when they're not separated by
source/author, but in how interesting I'll find them. I don't read an Ars
Technica article just because it's from ars.

To me it would be much better to get rid of the origin altogether to help
eliminate bias and focus on the actual story.

------
wwwtyro
Look at BBC's headlines compared to everyone else's. Someone explain this to
me.

~~~
brador
My 2 guesses: SEO or that little sidebar box they have showing popular
articles has a character limit to look good.

------
yogrish
Very nice collection. Few sites I never heard of. Thanks for sharing. Btw, You
Mentioned Amazon and Google Ad-sense in Privacy policy. I don't see any Ads,
have any plan to keep Ads on this site and make revenue?

~~~
brador
Ads depends on the hosting bill, but I like the clean interface so we'll see
how it goes.

The privacy policy is a copy, paste, find, replace from another site I run,
didn't expect this heat. Added to todo.

------
tseabrooks
I love this. The only thing I might like as an addition would be the ability
to reorganize and change the font. No login / account nonsense just save my
ordering and font choice in a cookie or something.

~~~
tseabrooks
I had a secondary thought. Does this page auto refresh? Can I just leave it
open on a separate virtual desktop... or do I need to refresh it?

~~~
brador
Does not auto-refresh right now. Reasoning: I wouldn't want to see a title,
then see it vanish before I get to click it.

Potential solution for V2: Toggle switch.

~~~
tseabrooks
I'm not familiar with the HN RSS. Is there a reason this doesn't match what I
see on the front page?

~~~
brador
It's not an official source for the HN feed, hence, I do believe it is delayed
since those links appear to be from a few hours ago. If I ever find a better
source or if anyone mentions one here I'll update. It can only get better.

------
morphics
Thanks for making me chuckle with the comments at the top of the source.

------
huhtenberg
The more time I spend consuming, the less time I spend producing. And _this_
is an online content firehose. It looks very nice and tempting, but thanks,
but no, thanks.

~~~
brador
I say you need a mix of both. Abstinence is not the answer.

~~~
mdaniel
I agree with you: 90% of the value of a developer is knowing what to type,
which includes what NOT to type. Knowing the difference comes (IMHO) from
being aware of what is out there and stories learned from the experience of
others.

So yes: perhaps less cat videos is a good thing, but less exposure to
information is not.

------
autophil
There was another news reader on HN recently, but this one is much better on
the iPhone (where I seem to be doing much of my reading lately).

I'll be using this page from now on. Nice work.

------
Hates_
For whatever reason I can't CMD-Click an article without being taken straight
to it. I normally like to open a load of links in the background then read
them one by one.

~~~
brador
They're all set to target _blank...could that be affecting your CMD-clicking?

~~~
Hates_
It's more a case of them being set to _BLANK instead of _blank. If I edit the
src to be the correct lowercase version, CMD-Clicking works as it should.

------
lardissone
Great collection of sources, but please, mark :visited links!

------
jpwagner
This is cool. Can you make the HN links point to the HN pages? Besides getting
easy access to the discussion, it sorta de-dupes the links.

------
mijail
Nice Work! I'm going to use this. If you want to make my OCD bookmarks bar
perfect, can you add a favicon?

~~~
brador
I cannot believe I forgot to make a favicon! ha. Added to todo list.

------
slantyyz
This reminds me a lot of Alltop.com - I believe you can create your own custom
page there as well.

------
denzil_correa
That is a really huge list.

~~~
brador
I know right, yet the site still weighs in at just 46.29kb thanks to the
wonders of gzip compression (156kb without).

Any ideas on feeds worth adding?

~~~
mike-cardwell
Any chance you could just store the images in a single local image and use CSS
sprites, instead of loading favicons from every different site. The front page
does 62 HTTP requests and they're all over the place...

~~~
brador
I could do, but the way it's built is using a master array in the page creator
file. To add a feed, I just add the new feed and favicon location into the
array. Storing the images would mean more work each time a new feed is added.

Having said that, CSS Sprites is something I don't know much about and will be
looking into.

~~~
charliepark
It'd take a tiny bit more work on the frontend, but instead of saving the
favicon location, you could save a data-uri of the favicon image. That would
then completely eliminate all of the external HTTP requests.

------
chrishan
isn't this an un-customized version of <http://www.newsblur.com/> ?

------
rjjacobson
How are you pulling all of the headlines?

~~~
brador
RSS/xml.

------
infinitebeam
jimmyr.com has been my homepage for three years and counting.

------
mrtunes
great work! i will visit this often.

