The best thing about old fashioned newspapers is how much information you can fit on the page. I would consider smaller fonts.
https://imgur.com/a/Ys1EyAf
Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper
61–70 of 129 posts
Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper
#62Just throws a CORS error in FF for me.
Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper
#63Please do not use justified formatting for text unless you can hyphenate it. Otherwise you end up with large chunks of white space between the words, especially in narrower (then 6070 characters) columns. Browsers don’t hyphenate, so avoid justified text on the web.
Real newspapers do justify text, and they do end up with large chunks of white space between words. I think OP was going for the newspaper look so that part is quite authentic even though I agree it may not be the best design choice for "normal" web pages.
I know real newspapers do hyphenate, but the site would probably look a lot less like a newspaper without justified text.
Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper
#64I really like the feel of reading textual posts here, if there was an option to actually read whole posts I'd be sold.
P.S. I think special characters need to be unescaped (> → &)
Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper
#65I really like the feel of reading textual posts here, if there was an option to actually read whole posts I'd be sold. P.S. I think special characters need to be unescaped (> → &)
Yep, you're right -- I didn't realize Reddit encoded their string values as HTML in their JSON API. Fix rolling out! :) Thanks.
Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper
#66It’s very interesting from a psychological standpoint: the current front page headline (for me?) is “Planets and dwarf planets to scale in size, rotation speed, axial tilt and oblateness (numbered in distance order from Sun)” If I were reading this on /r/dataisbeautiful, I’d immediately parse and grok the headline just fine. But with this, my mindset was on the reporting of actions or events and I read “to scale” as…
You're right. It works great with NotTheOnion for example: https://unim.press/#nottheonion
Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper
#67My first reaction to this was, "why?" The skeuomorphism of the low-res paper background and ugly type is horrible. But, reading the comments here, apparently some people like it, so ok.
But you can see all the CORS issues this is throwing up. Rather than a 100% js app, why not call a function which fetches the content and caches it too? CORS issues begone, and caches too! You don't need an expensive server setup, have a look at AWS Lambda or Azure Functions.
Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper
#68Would be cool if there was one of these for the front page of HN. Pretty challenging to parse though. Headlines and comments should be simple enough, articles and images not so much.
My thoughts too! Hacker News was actually in a prototype of this and you can try it by going to https://unim.press/#hn -- but indeed, it didn't look great without pictures. Might be able to scrape linked articles and such, but I didn't get that far in an afternoon hack.
Text alone can be beautiful.
As one example, the front page of the Wall Street Journal in 1987 was predominantly text. [1]
[1]: https://wsjshop.com/products/framed-reprint-crash-of-1987-st... "Black Monday Crash of 1987"
Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper
#69I think you could find lots of stuff on Reddit that could go on page 3
Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper
#70It hangs on "reading stories". Web app authors can be very creative, but one thing I don't like about web apps is that often their error handling is nonexistent. It's not about individual authors; behemots like Microsoft also do this in an irritating way: "Something did not work. Reload the page please" -- Is this really the best a billion dollar company can do? Well, I suppose this is still better than no error at a…
It actually does handle errors properly -- the reddit api is probably blocked for you, which is why it hangs and can't do anything. I suppose I could have added a "it seems we can't reach Reddit" kind of message, but that would still have been an error state, and in rushing this out in an afternoon it wasn't much of a priority. Didn't realize until posting here that apparently Firefox blocks the reddit api from the b…
> It actually does handle errors properly
IMO if a website displays a loading message indefinitely then this isn’t error handling.
I’d say that showing accurate feedback is part of proper error handling; like the one you suggested:
> I suppose I could have added a "it seems we can't reach Reddit" kind of message,
Not that a hobby project needs error handling, it’s cool even without it.