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Text-only CNN

lite.cnn.io

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Re: Text-only CNN

#311

Post by erikbye »

tptacek wrote: post #13

This is better than CNN.com, but the big problem with CNN is that it simply isn't very good. If you're haven't tried it again, let me again strongly recommend a subscription to the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times. You might be as surprised as I was, once I was free to click around the sites without thinking about paywalls, how much better the reporting is at real newspapers than it is…

Beware, you cannot cancel your subscription to Wall Street Journal without calling them.

Re: Text-only CNN

#312

Post by heyoni »

problems wrote: post #273
dalbasal wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

remember when rss was going to give us this?

RSS does give us this. http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss TinyTinyRSS and Fever make it a pretty good experience too.

Except that some RSS feeds only give you excerpts of the story lest you visit their page (looking at you Reuters!)

Re: Text-only CNN

#313

Post by heyoni »

knz wrote: post #227
gravypod wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd pay $5/month for a reputable news site to provide this all year long.

http://www.npr.org ? It's not text only but it's considerably more minimal than most news websites, loads almost instantly, doesn't have auto play content, and is considered a reputable source. The BBC used to be similar but their international website is awful now (slow to load, more adverts, and less emphasis on actual news).

Just use ublock origin in advanced mode and disable third party everything. Most sites look completely broken until you find and enable their one cdn (and only that!), meanwhile 100 other requests stay blocked. Save those rules as you go and it's easy browsing from then on!

Re: Text-only CNN

#315

Post by commenter1 »

The analytics company I used to work had a private news archive for pretty much every news paper/magazine you could imagine. All text, all searchable. I've long wondered how come no one makes a site like that for everybody.

Re: Text-only CNN

#316

Post by apostrophest »

rwbt wrote: post #33

Also, NPR has had a text only site for ages http://thin.npr.org

NPR developer here. We launched some changes to the text site this morning.

NPR set up a text site in late 2001. A developer reworked the text site in 2005. We have made very few changes since then.

The site is a set of a few PHP scripts querying our MySQL CMS database directly with no caching. The HTML and JS were aimed at providing a decent mobile experience in 2005. That included a lot of hacks and workarounds for extremely defunct platforms.

The newsroom asked us to make some improvements. The main features:

- display more news stories following editorial order rather than reverse chron,

- remove the obnoxious interstitial "read more" view for stories,

- put the text site behind Akamai like our other web properties,

- configure HTTPS on the text site (still in progress and won't be the default due to TLS overhead)

It should be a lot faster and more pleasant to use.

Thank you to everyone who made lots of noise about CNN's text offering. There is a small contingent of developers at NPR who love the text site to the point that they've created replacements as personal projects. They were very excited to improve it for the public!

Re: Text-only CNN

#317

Post by morganvachon »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #280
morganvachon wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A while back I did a comparison of the code behind the major search engines' landing pages, and found that DuckDuckGo is by far the cleanest, simplest, and most accessible, yet they still manage to make a living on text ads in their results. Another easy way to see the difference is to load each site up in a text-only browser like links . You'll find that DDG has the cleanest interface there, too. I still use Startpa…

Duckduck go is a pretty good engine for 90% of searches. I wonder however whether its (perhaps tenuous) connection with Yandex and Russia should give pause? I admit I have only read this in a headline several years back.

I've never heard of anything like that; my understanding is that it's an American company that uses Bing as the back end.

Re: Text-only CNN

#318

Post by luckydude »

jonesnc wrote: post #306
luckydude wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new google news page is awful. It's classic user interface designer making stuff pretty with no thought on how to display news. The old page was much better, it was denser. I friggin hate Google news now and am looking for a better news source. I'm not loving text only, I'd be happy with a text only top level and then text & pics for the stories. I'll check out MSN.

https://theoldgnews.com Old Google News clone.

Wow, awesome. Is there a paypal link where I can donate to support this? Or some other way?
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