

Show HN: Newscombinator - tomw1808
http://newscombinator.com/#/

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tomw1808
Let me give some more information. First, lesson learned, do not post on HN
when tired. The ups and downs after posting are incredible, even if its just a
private project. I couldn't be more thankful for the powerful emotions that
arrive when I see my code in the open wild after weeks and months of coding.
:)

The tool here is "just a frontend" I've build as an API-sideproject of mine.
So, what does it do? In one sentence: Newscombinator gathers news from
different sources, downloads it, makes a screenshot, cleans it, natural
language process it, and push it through a MySQL DB into a Solr index.

The Solr-select handler is passed through a REST handler. Why that, why not
directly the solr select handler? Because the REST handler also exposes
endpoints to the MySQL Database. Some things are just not feasible in Solr
alone. For example its hard to build aggregation queries in solr (think:
SELECT AVG(points), SUM(points) FROM ... WHERE date_news_found ...), I've made
that available in MySQL. And its easy to shift all that to a MariaDB cluster,
or to an Amazon RDS, just in case...

What is available here is a RESTful interface to a Solr-Index with all Hacker-
News articles, selected Reddits, etc, starting from Oct 2014. That is around
200k of articles. Including searchable content. I think that is a good base to
start with for me.

Thank you in the meantime HN, I've learned something.

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ch215
For me, neither website renders without javascript. A blank screen's a poor
first impression. Maybe it's a pet peeve but I'm sure I'm not the only one who
blocks JS by default.

Also, making the panels on the right of the landing page opaque would aid
readability.

~~~
tomw1808
Thank you, I'll take is as a valuable feedback for the landingpage, which
really needs some more improvement.

Regarding the non-JS users. I am wondering how you can survive in the modern
web. That shouldn't be meant as offensive statement, rather than I have the
gut feeling that most websites are more like apps currently, running heavily
on JS. That really makes me wonder...

~~~
ch215
No offense taken. I use noscript to whitelist websites and grant temporary
permissions to others as needed.

To clarify, I have no problem with you using JS. I know I may have to enable
it go gain functionality sometimes. My gripe is that on your sites I get zero
functionality without it.

I don't mean to cause offense either. Thought it may be something you hadn't
considered is all.

~~~
tomw1808
You're absolutely right, I didn't consider it at all, shame on me, and a lot
of shame. Actually, I didn't even think of it, although that is something I am
almost praying when working with clients: make your sites at least usable
without JS. Weird that I got caught there. Thank you.

------
tomw1808
OP here, was hoping to get some feedback from the HN community on my tool
here. The landingpage for now: [http://nagrgtr.com](http://nagrgtr.com) and
there is more to come. Thank you.

~~~
smt88
Newscombinator and the landing page are very difficult to read. There are lots
of fonts that are too low-contrast or too small. There isn't lots of good
visual separation between different elements.

I don't want to get into a huge usability discussion right now, but it's
important, and you should definitely look into it.

~~~
greggh
Everything smt88 just said. It is hard on the eyes, hard to read.

The site itself actually looks like something I would read and share with
everyone if the UI/UX issues get worked out.

~~~
tomw1808
Interesting, is there any specific font face or size that you'd recommend? I
know ui/ux is always very subtle, but i have the feeling that there must be a
golden standard and i miss that...

