Interesting idea. I couldn't open the site, though, because uBO blocked something like 50 domains and figuring which ones are actually needed would be quite an effort. Yes, my uBO blocks everything unless I make an exception.
Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper
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Re: Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper
#62Fascinating! Just to keep the conversation going, I'll argue that HN's current format works much better for me. I appreciate newspaper formats when dozens of stories have roughly equal appeal to me, and I get value out of lingering on each one for 5-30 seconds before moving on. HN, for me, is intensely bimodal. The bare-bones listing of headlines lets me skim very fast past the 93% that don't quite work for me -- and…
Unfortunately many headlines stopped being informative with the rise of clickbait. One of HN's biggest problems is the headline-only format, as opposed to Slashdot for instance. I mostly choose what to click from an HN Twitter bot since Twitter shows short preview blurbs for many links. This is also a strength of the linked site compared to plain HN. As for the newspaper layout, yeah, that's a gimmick I don't need either.
Re: Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper
#63Looks way better than the real newspapers I see on the internet and I quite like it for Hacker News too. You just need some ads and you're set (joking).
I'm very impressed anyway.
Re: Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper
#64Interesting idea. I couldn't open the site, though, because uBO blocked something like 50 domains and figuring which ones are actually needed would be quite an effort. Yes, my uBO blocks everything unless I make an exception.
Congratulations on having a browser that doesn’t work? Most of requests are thumbnail images (I’m hotlinking at the moment); to get things to display you can either disable JavaScript altogether or unblock just unpkg.com to get the libraries the page needs for layout.
Edit: just for you I’ve added a check to handle the case when the libraries can’t be loaded. It will look broken but at least you should be able to read it now.
Re: Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper
#65I have JS off by default and the site still loads -- in fact it's exactly the same (including all functionality) except it's got a mobile layout? When I enable JS then it lays out like a real newspaper. That's interesting.
Progressive enhancement! CSS isn’t quite up to the task of arranging things the way I wanted so I’m using Masonry.js for layout. (This is also why there’s a progress bar while the page loads—it needs to wait for all the images so Masonry knows how much space everything takes. I’d like to cache the images and pre-specify their sizes but haven’t gotten to it yet.)
For whatever it's worth, on mobile I think I'd prefer it without images, or maybe just a select few images throughout the page. The page just feels too long. I'm not sure what a good way would be to pick out which to show though. But I really like this! I'm excited to try it on desktop in a bit.
Re: Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper
#66Looks way better than the real newspapers I see on the internet and I quite like it for Hacker News too. You just need some ads and you're set (joking). I'm very impressed anyway.
There’s already some classified job ads at the bottom of the page—I figured it fit in with the theme and it was a good way to thank HN for making an API available.
Re: Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper
#67You should find a better font and work a little on the proportions. Nice to see the images, a little more polished and I would use this instead of the normal HN website.
The font is whatever you have as the default in your browser—if you don’t like it then set a better one :) I agree about the spacing, it feels off to me too but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Whitespace has always been a challenge for me (I still remember my mom looking at my elementary school projects and telling me repeatedly, “Margins! You need more margins!”) and though I’m getting better at it I don’t expect t…
body {
font-kerning: none;
letter-spacing: -0.00214em;
font-family: Helvetica;
}
You probably shouldn't use serif, Helvetica is much easier on the eyes and more forgiving.
Re: Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper
#68Ok, now something that turns a newspaper into HN format? Or has that already been done?
tada https://boards.kenforthewin.com/b/news
That's cool but it doesn't seem to have any users. And only NYT as a source (for now). And even if it had users there's no way to align them with my interests (you might get a hoard of neo-nazis upvoting all the wrong stories). This could be solved by basing it off a specific subreddit, for example.
That said it's a cool RSS'y way of browsing NYT.
Re: Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper
#69OMG, how very beautiful ! Is it fully automatic? Will it persist?
Re: Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper
#70This looks really amazing! I particularly like that it makes good use of the width of an ultra-wide screen.
While I wouldn't want it to replace the actual hackernews layout, I can really see it shine for discovering interesting articles whose headlines alone do not tell me enough to identify them as interesting (seems perfect for Friday afternoons).
One suggestion: I would appreciate more visual hints to indicate which images and texts belong together. When I scroll down the site and something catches my eye, it takes me a bit of looking around to be sure where to read for the corresponding text. Slightly larger margins and/or vertical and/or horizontal lines between the articles might help to make it feel more convenient.