Live data from Hacker News

O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

theawl.com

111–120 of 187 posts

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#111
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't agree: heavy Google Reader user and now a NewsBlur one. While I appreciate the NewsBlur existence it is very very very slow while Google Reader was extremely fast. I don't know if NewsBlur only retrieves my feeds when I start a request or if it constantly retrieves them on the backend. Disclosure: I have 2350 feeds in NewsBlur.

Is that... normal? 2350 feeds seems like an astronomical amount of news feeds. Can I ask how much of that do you read?

Agreed, very curious how much of that actually gets even glanced over.

I thought I was information overload with ~150 sites. I hope OP uses the 'focus' features so they can get a modicum of information from those 2350 feeds.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#112

I've been paying for newsblur ( http://www.newsblur.com/ ) ever since google reader bit the dust. It's pretty much a direct replacement. Interface has come a long way since day one and is sufficiently slick now (UI, keyboard shortcuts, etc) that I don't really notice it. Highly recommended by a (former) hardcore google reader user. If I recall correctly, got quite a good bit of press here on HN at the time.

I'm a newsblur user but it is in no way a placement for reader. For one newsblur will only track the last 30 days of posts (or is it 30 news posts). So for example in reader I might add site like Unity's blog. Reader would show the entire history as unread. I could then slowly go through all the old tutorials since they're all there. Newsblur I can't do that. It won't pull in stuff past a certain date/count. That als…

When I look at a feed with the 'All / Newest' setting, it is showing me stuff that is over 3 years old. Maybe just the view you are using?

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that... normal? 2350 feeds seems like an astronomical amount of news feeds. Can I ask how much of that do you read?

Agreed, very curious how much of that actually gets even glanced over. I thought I was information overload with ~150 sites. I hope OP uses the 'focus' features so they can get a modicum of information from those 2350 feeds.

It's possible that many of those could be discarded without being read. As an example, I'm subscribed to the Best Of Metafilter RSS feed, but if I'm on vacation for a week and come back to over a hundred posts, I just mark 'em all as read.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Reader had a very important social aspect as well

People keep forgetting this. Google Reader was the best social network for academically minded people that I have ever been part of. As one blogger after it's shutdown said: it was a social network for people who don't want to talk about themselves

That's a perfect way of phrasing why I think reader is the best social network Google ever made. Thank you.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#115
RSS really simplifies reading news. Having multiple sources in a single place and compact lists are obvious benefits, but even if you only subscribe to 1 site, you'd save a ton of time simply by not having to rescan over stuff you've already read or decided not to read. Over the past month I've logged out of and stopped going directly to media sites and replaced them with RSS feeds. That's including YouTube, which was a pain to do but I only subscribed to about 15 channels. I do fear Google will kill the feed urls at some point.

I've been searching for a cross-platform desktop RSS reader. Thunderbird is what I use for now and I would stop looking if I could just filter URLs but the filtering only seems to be built for email, which works if the URL is in the "body" of the feed item, but not all feeds are structured like that (e.g. HN). RSSOwl looks real promising but doesn't run for me on Windows 10 and hasn't been updated in 2 years. I'd prefer a standalone RSS reader, not a email client with RSS tacked on. I looked at everything in the comments so far but they all fall a little short.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a newsblur user but it is in no way a placement for reader. For one newsblur will only track the last 30 days of posts (or is it 30 news posts). So for example in reader I might add site like Unity's blog. Reader would show the entire history as unread. I could then slowly go through all the old tutorials since they're all there. Newsblur I can't do that. It won't pull in stuff past a certain date/count. That als…

When I look at a feed with the 'All / Newest' setting, it is showing me stuff that is over 3 years old. Maybe just the view you are using?

Here's the specific issue

https://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/topics/unread_items_are...

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#117
post #43
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter used to provide an RSS feed, that's gone too.

If you google "twitter rss" you will discover four sites that will do that for you as a free service and a node program that will do the conversion for you as well... on the first page of results, anyway. I switched from Reader to TT-RSS. Now there's no fear that anyone will start analyzing my subscription list, send me personalized ads or suddenly stop serving me.

>suddenly stop serving me. Those four sites are explicitly breaking Twitter API TOS, so I think you should have at least a little fear that they will suddenly disappear :)

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#118

I've been using http://theoldreader.com ever since. As the name implies, it does a pretty good job of mimicking Google Reader.

Since this seems to be the thread for alternatives... Someone at the time of Reader's demise recommended Selfoss, and I've been running it ever since. It's not quite as good, but it does what I wanted from Reader.

I also use Selfoss, it does what I need it to. Although the author's decision to override the Space key is odd. I comment that part of the JS and let the aggregated js regenerate to return that behavior to the browser.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#119

I've been paying for newsblur ( http://www.newsblur.com/ ) ever since google reader bit the dust. It's pretty much a direct replacement. Interface has come a long way since day one and is sufficiently slick now (UI, keyboard shortcuts, etc) that I don't really notice it. Highly recommended by a (former) hardcore google reader user. If I recall correctly, got quite a good bit of press here on HN at the time.

Thank you for posting about NewsBlur. I'd like to remind everybody that one of its most important features is that it is entirely open source

http://github.com/samuelclay

This means that if I were to ever invoke the bus factor you would still be able to use the same reader you use today. It negates the Google Reader problem and gives you confidence that I'm not selling your data or doing anything nefarious.

Plus it means you can contribute your own pet feature. About sixty people have done that so far, for web, iOS, and android. Open sourcing has paid off in spades and I'm planning to do the same for my next secret project, of which I'm in China for right now.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#120
post #75
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you google "twitter rss" you will discover four sites that will do that for you as a free service and a node program that will do the conversion for you as well... on the first page of results, anyway. I switched from Reader to TT-RSS. Now there's no fear that anyone will start analyzing my subscription list, send me personalized ads or suddenly stop serving me.

Twitter could shut down those four sites at any time. I also switched to TinyTinyRSS and also self-host a simple Twitter to RSS parser. Anyone savvy enough to set up TT-RSS can manage getting a Twitter API key and configuring this. https://github.com/jdelamater99/Twitter-RSS-Parser

I tried that recently and discovered that Twitter now require a mobile number to obtain API access even for read-only, which was an immediate hard-stop.
Post reply on HN