Suggest considering implementing a bridge to NNTP, or SMTP mail spools. Then use offline NTTP or mail readers.
That reminds me of how https://forum.dlang.org works: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed It also uses SQLite.
Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
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Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#12Sounds interesting. Here are a couple of extra ideas:
- an Android app embodying the same features,
- The ability to comment while offline.
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#13I'd be very interested in something that can cache the actual article/page from the main HN link as well as a reading list. There are times when I add HN articles to mobile chrome's "read later" list, and when I have time go through them. Being able to read them later when not having internet access would be amazing (London's tube is annoying when it comes to internet, internet only exists in the stations).
I believe squid can do this, I experimented using it on a raspberry pi to cache HN locally so it could be accessed offline, it managed to get the front page ok but I honestly don't know enough to get it working, and the hardware I was using wasn't up to the task
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#14If up/downvoting would work in Lynx, I wouldn't actually need a CLI tool to read HN. Well, I guess you can't have anerything. I wouldn't need offline mode, but a CLI tool to read HN would be very much welcome.
Doesn't it work in Lynx? Upvoting/Downvoting works with JS disabled in Chrome, pretty sure it just uses tags which work in Lynx right?
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#15The query api at: https://hn.algolia.com is pretty amazing, searches all stories.
The biggest qualms for me would be; notifications of comments and searching my previous comments.
Other than that Hacker News is actually highly reliable and available and I've never personally needed an off-line version (except maybe on a plane)
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#16One thing I'd find useful:
- save individual posts as "favorites", and allow users to tag them somehow (e.g. 'finance', or 'front-end') for easy searchability. The saved quote should be available for offline reading, and should link back to the original topic. The original topic doesn't need to be available offline.
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#17I'm thinking about the same thing i.e. building a personal HN reader with Python and QT. I have never explored the API, and I'm not a professional programmer, but allow me to describe the ideas from top of head when I read your posts: Requirements: 1 - Self-hosted: So essentially, it's too heavy to keep the whole sites offline. However, because I always read by topic (e.g. I'd type "SICP ycombinator" in Google and re…
This sounds like an rss reader in a way - subscribe to topics, it fetches them at set whatever intervals, can fave / save..
Option to download a copy of the article the hn discsussion is about and create a thumbnail..
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#18Suggest considering implementing a bridge to NNTP, or SMTP mail spools. Then use offline NTTP or mail readers.
Yes, I think a bridge to NNTP would also be helpful. The ability to post through NNTP might be good too.
This would provide some of the listed features when using a suitable NNTP client; my own NNTP client called "bystand" supports SQL (it stores all data in a SQLite database; if you use the SQLite FTS extension then full text search is available), but other clients may have different features, so may be more suitable for your use possibly.
(I think that all web forums and mailing lists should be NNTP instead. It is OK to have a web interface too as long as the NNTP server and message ID can be read from the web interface (even if JavaScript and CSS is disabled), so that if you are given links to the web interface then you can access the NNTP if you want to do. It would also be possible to provide a email interface too if wanted.)
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#19I'm thinking about the same thing i.e. building a personal HN reader with Python and QT. I have never explored the API, and I'm not a professional programmer, but allow me to describe the ideas from top of head when I read your posts: Requirements: 1 - Self-hosted: So essentially, it's too heavy to keep the whole sites offline. However, because I always read by topic (e.g. I'd type "SICP ycombinator" in Google and re…
"I think it might be too much work to parse queries, and the easiest thing to do is to just access a string as query and pass that to the database engine." -- You could also use SQLite virtual table; this allows combining it with other data in the same query; SQLite will then automatically convert your query into a list of constraints, ORDER BY clause, etc, and pass the stuff to your xBestIndex method, which can decide which things the server is capable of using and pass those to the back end, letting SQLite handle the rest of the query itself.
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#20I'd like to be able to move a discussion thread to the bottom, or collapse a discussion thread. Perhaps sort by timestamp the comments option as well.
Sometimes the scroll gets real and I want to get past a discussion to see other angles of whatever subject - scrolling trying to find where thread 2 ends and a different subject comes up is challenging at times - so I often go to a new tab on a different story and don't come back.
Even click/tap to draw a line from comment 2 to all sub comments so I can find where comment 3 starts would be helpful.