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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:
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
My biggest gripe with Pulse and similar readers is that clicking on a headline takes me to an article stub with an option to click a link to the full article. Just take me to the article!
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.
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...
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is an issue for me as well. Ideally, I'd like to be able to command-click five or ten articles, then get through them one by one, rather than having to return to SkimLinks after I read each one.
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.
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...
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.
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.
The Next Web added, should show on the next db refresh.
Plans is an interesting question, thanks for asking.
When I built it originally I had this huge project in mind (as we all do :) ), bookmarks, saved articles in a user area, FB login, link tracking for a "most popular links box", live stream, recommendation algos, the works.
I guess this scale is one of the reasons I originally dropped it.
After the rediscovery I thought "let's go MVP on this". So I cut everything back. What you see is what surivived. Literally, just the news links, on a html page, that is quick to load with no server hit.
Future plans - let's see how it goes eh. If the hosting bill enters the trips I'll drop a few ads in, but I like the cleanness of it all for now.
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