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Show HN: My all-nighter project to find the best Google Reader alternative

replacereader.com

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Re: Show HN: My all-nighter project to find the best Google Reader alternative

#41

Post by tomasr »

jsmeaton wrote: post #26

Am I the only one who just wants a list of updated articles and possibly an unread count? I don't want social in my RSS. I don't want to "discover" feeds. I don't want to be told what to read. I don't want to follow people. For me, the whole point of RSS is that I find a site I like, I add it to my list, and I'm told when there's a new article. I've tried several alternatives in the last 24 hours, and most of them ig…

If you find that, let us know. Many of us feel very much the same way (which is why I loved the old greader. new reader ain't as good, but still got the job done... sort of)

Re: Show HN: My all-nighter project to find the best Google Reader alternative

#42

Post by tr4656 »

jsmeaton wrote: post #26

Am I the only one who just wants a list of updated articles and possibly an unread count? I don't want social in my RSS. I don't want to "discover" feeds. I don't want to be told what to read. I don't want to follow people. For me, the whole point of RSS is that I find a site I like, I add it to my list, and I'm told when there's a new article. I've tried several alternatives in the last 24 hours, and most of them ig…

Agreed. I'm thinking of paying for Fever just so I can get an reader but haven't heard of many people using it before.

Re: Show HN: My all-nighter project to find the best Google Reader alternative

#44

Post by abrowne »

jsmeaton wrote: post #26

Am I the only one who just wants a list of updated articles and possibly an unread count? I don't want social in my RSS. I don't want to "discover" feeds. I don't want to be told what to read. I don't want to follow people. For me, the whole point of RSS is that I find a site I like, I add it to my list, and I'm told when there's a new article. I've tried several alternatives in the last 24 hours, and most of them ig…

I want that, and I want it in oldest-first order. So many of the alternatives I've tried only offer newest first!

Re: Show HN: My all-nighter project to find the best Google Reader alternative

#45

Post by mattmcknight »

Surprised Feedly is so highly ranked. I tried it out after the last set of Google Reader changes and deleted it after about a week. The mobile app is really awful for skimming lots of content and is too focused on presenting a newspaper like layout. It's all pictures...

Re: Show HN: My all-nighter project to find the best Google Reader alternative

#46

Post by Gormo »

jsmeaton wrote: post #26

Am I the only one who just wants a list of updated articles and possibly an unread count? I don't want social in my RSS. I don't want to "discover" feeds. I don't want to be told what to read. I don't want to follow people. For me, the whole point of RSS is that I find a site I like, I add it to my list, and I'm told when there's a new article. I've tried several alternatives in the last 24 hours, and most of them ig…

I've never used Google Reader for just these very reasons, and have been using Thunderbird for several years, even though Thunderbird is hardly ideal. The disadvantages of existing web-based readers really outweigh the one feature that's really superior in web-based clients, that being ubiquitous synchronization.

What I'd love to see in a reader:

* Email-like interface

* Custom folder hierarchy, allowing filtering of specific feeds into specific folders.

* A "unified inbox" that shows new items from all feeds, outside the normal folder hierarchy.

* Highly customizable text themes, allowing font, size, and color defaults to be easily configured without having to write custom CSS.

* Automatic retrieval of the full article for RSS items that don't include full text, parsed through a readable/readability-like filter, conforming to the user's defined text theme.

* Automatic retrieval of the comments feed for each article, to be displayed in a separate pane or tab.

* Integrated streaming of audio and video for podcast feeds, with playback positions remembered from session to session.

* No feed recommendations, no integrated "feed gallery", no integration with any external sites - especially Facebook; at most, "share link" buttons for individual sites that can be customized and disabled individually by the user (so, e.g., I could optionally add a button to my UI for posting the artice to HN or reddit).

I'd be willing to pay for a client that had this featureset.

Re: Show HN: My all-nighter project to find the best Google Reader alternative

#48

Post by jbackus »

3amOpsGuy wrote: post #43

Really impressed with the aesthetics, especially for such a quick turnaround. Had a peek under the covers and it appears to be well done there too. Top marks in my book.

Thank you! I threw together the backbone action under the hood, all credit goes to Alain for the awesome design. We're pretty sure this post would have about 3 upvotes had it not been for the bobbing ship.

Re: Show HN: My all-nighter project to find the best Google Reader alternative

#49

Post by fakeer »

jsmeaton wrote: post #26

Am I the only one who just wants a list of updated articles and possibly an unread count? I don't want social in my RSS. I don't want to "discover" feeds. I don't want to be told what to read. I don't want to follow people. For me, the whole point of RSS is that I find a site I like, I add it to my list, and I'm told when there's a new article. I've tried several alternatives in the last 24 hours, and most of them ig…

- Use a client that supports RSS.

- Sync your data with Dropbox and use it on other machines.

Or

FeedHQ.org (Open Source) looks like a fine alternative but I am not sure what it supports yet in terms of your needs. Like they do have list, unread counts, tags(categories). Well, they have support read it later(which you said you don't want, maybe - but it's not that social :P)

Hell, even I do not want a social service or another GR or maybe not another free service that will go kaput anyday.

I guess FeedHQ guys have a real chance here with NewsBlur too cluttered and too slow.

Re: Show HN: My all-nighter project to find the best Google Reader alternative

#50

Post by jbackus »

dstroot wrote: post #28

How are you guys processing the tweets to show the results? Would love to know more about that.

We're using Ruby, Sinatra, HTTParty, Twitter Search API, Postgres, and Unicorn on a Heroku instance. Basically requesting the page pulls recent tweets from twitter matching the search '#replacereader', those tweets are checked against the DB to prevent dupe counting or multiple votes from one account, and new votes are added accordingly. Vote counts along with our list of replacements are pulled from the database and passed to a haml view, and unicorn caches page requests (including DB lookups and Twitter lookups) for 60 seconds to prevent exceeding APIs or Heroku's Postgres database limits.
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