There seem to be no ads. How do they plan to make money with this?
They're probably going for native advertising.
Text-only CNN
101–110 of 319 posts
Re: Text-only CNN
#102Also, NPR has had a text only site for ages http://thin.npr.org
It's so fast, feels like it's hosted locally
if you click Topics -> News[0] it takes 2.7 seconds. They should throw that subdomain behind https://memcached.org/ (and not use php lol).
Unrelated, seems like I can't listen to podcasts. There's an tag (which doesn't use data unless you click on play if you set preload="none" [1]), so that's an interesting choice.
$ curl http://thin.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001
[...]
Total wall clock time: 2.7s
$ ping thin.npr.org
[...]
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 76.407/78.359/86.985/2.442 ms
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/au...
Re: Text-only CNN
#103They're still loading an analytics javascript file that is 230KB minified. That's literally two orders of magnitude larger than anything else that gets loaded from that URL.
You don't know how to block these?
Re: Text-only CNN
#104When Google first came out and we tried it there were two things we liked about it. The first: Good search results. Yeah everyone knows that right. But young people today might have forgotten the second reason we liked Google search back then: The Second: A clean page with a single logo and search field. It loaded quick. There were no banners everywhere, no bs. HackerNews has that feel. It is clean, information dense…
I'd add that Google News used to have that clean feel too, many years ago. Each generation it gets worse. The latest generation using AMP is nearly unreadable on my Nexus 5 phone, it bogs it to a crawl.
And for no benefit it all (or even regression), that's what maddens me.
Re: Text-only CNN
#105Imma crawl the shit out of this
Re: Text-only CNN
#106There is a signifiant value prop for this type of clean interface when considering users that use accessibility tools to browse the web. I had the pleasure of working with an engineer whose vision was impaired. Truly inspired with all the self-engineered tools and software that he created to sanitize sites of all the bloat for his consumption with a screen reader. This type of site will make his life a little easier.
Re: Text-only CNN
#107If only CNN would go back to being the old but trusted, amazing CNN, with Christiane Amanpour at the landing in Mogadishu during Restore Hope, or Bernie Shaw at the hotel in Baghdad for Desert Storm. Now, a shell of its old self, CNN is just MSNBC's cousin, with people who say "we, ahem, I mean, the Democrats, are losing Michigan" live on screen. Oh well. It's been years since I relied on CNN. But on the technical fr…
Ah, the good ol' days, when CNN didn't have CIA minders moderating its releases and directing its reporting policies, because of, y'know .. "the war on the TERROR" .. before The Patriot Act came and ruined America.
Yeah, I remember those days too. While I'm glad that CNN has become more accessible with this text interface, I'm still not going to read it. It is, without a doubt, highly unreliable a news source, and not something one should be using to base ones world view on ..
Re: Text-only CNN
#108When Google first came out and we tried it there were two things we liked about it. The first: Good search results. Yeah everyone knows that right. But young people today might have forgotten the second reason we liked Google search back then: The Second: A clean page with a single logo and search field. It loaded quick. There were no banners everywhere, no bs. HackerNews has that feel. It is clean, information dense…
The second reason was the predominant reason. We already had a lot of options for search results with search engines like Altavista/aggregate sites. It's the simplicity of Google that made Google.
PS. It's also the reason Google now is increasingly less special (but they do try to keep it simple when they can, subtly).
Re: Text-only CNN
#109EDIT: As I wrote this, someone deployed a server-side rendered version of the site. Now the site is perfect. :) This site appears to load ~350 KB of JavaScript, which I think is a bit excessive for a "lite" text-only site. From the sourcemaps, I found a long list of libraries, including: * react * redux * redux-thunk * react-router * axios * base64-js (why not window.atob/btoa?) * core-js * fbjs * react-hot-loader (s…
WTF? why any JS at all for something that's pure content?
It has no benefit on the client itself, but in this (server-rendered) case, you can think of it as improved PHP/Ruby/....
Re: Text-only CNN
#110I the only one whose mind crossed the idea that maybe this is just a temporary service during the natural disasters in the south of the US?