Hey HN! I had the week off for the 4th of July holiday but canceled my vacation plans due to COVID, so I figured I'd do one of those "7 days of code" things where I do 7 different projects in the week. I wanted to create some things I would use and keep my programming skills sharp since I do data analytics rather than software engineering as my day job.
This was supposed to be Day 2, but ended up taking me about 3-4 days to get to the current state.
The problem I wanted to solve is that basically, I am addicted to Twitter. I get my news from Twitter, so I'm constantly pulling it up and scrolling through it throughout the day. But there's a lot of noise on Twitter--a ton of low quality content, mean-spirited comments, and so on. I wanted a way to stay on top of the news that met the following criteria:
1. One place to see new articles/posts from a bunch of different sources. I didn't want to have to pull up each news site individually.
2. No comments or noise--just the latest headlines.
3. Customizable - I can add new sources I come across, group them in different ways by subject.
4. Public - If someone else added some interesting news sites, it would be cool to see that and find something new to follow myself.
5. No authentication - Handling passwords and user state is a pain. Just let everyone see everything!
So I made "PaperPup" (the name came from the idea of your dog fetching you the morning paper). While there are other RSS aggregators out there, a lot of them feel clunky to me and don't necessarily have the public aspect I wanted. In technical terms, it's a Rails API backend with a "kind-of-vanilla" HTML/CSS/JQuery single-page front-end. As I mentioned I'm not really a software engineer, so this is nothing fancy; I wanted to make sure my skills on some of the basics were still up-to-date rather than experimenting with whatever the hot new languages/frameworks are these days.
Anyway, I hope you all like it! If you have any suggestions or questions (technical, feature-wise, or other apps to use), I'd love to hear them.
One thing that irked me was the lack of a back functionality. You could use a hash router and just make pages for the categories so one could easily go back to the home page :)
Ah yes that's probably something I should add. It irked me too when I was starting out but then I got used to using the "Home" button and forgot that I needed to do something about it.
Thanks! I actually hadn’t come across Memeorandum before, but it looks neat. I like its simplicity as well, and the previews it shows. One issue I ran into making this is that not all RSS feeds seem to contain descriptions, so it was hard to make something like that work and look consistent.
Yeah - It's actually pretty neat because it headlines the stories that people (blogs) are talking about.
There used to be a browser plug-in (Memeorandum Colors) that did an SVD breakdown of the top 1500-or-so commenting sites and came up with a "line" from Deep-blue to Deep-red (blue, baby-blue, white, pink, red) and would shade every commenter according to their "bias".
It was neat! I liked the site a lot more when the add-on worked. I fixed it for a couple of generations, but FF (which I use) started making it a lot harder to keep up with.
It’s something I’d like to do, since I’ve noticed using it on my phone isn’t the best experience (though also not the worst-hopefully it’s the same on other kinds of phones! Let me know if not).
It’ll probably be the next big “feature” I work on.
Thanks! Users can add new RSS feeds already, though it’s a bit hidden. If you click the “New Collection” Button, there’s a link at the bottom of the pop-up that says “Don’t see your favorite blog or website? Add it here” which lets you add a new feed.
13 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 31.8 ms ] threadThis was supposed to be Day 2, but ended up taking me about 3-4 days to get to the current state.
The problem I wanted to solve is that basically, I am addicted to Twitter. I get my news from Twitter, so I'm constantly pulling it up and scrolling through it throughout the day. But there's a lot of noise on Twitter--a ton of low quality content, mean-spirited comments, and so on. I wanted a way to stay on top of the news that met the following criteria:
1. One place to see new articles/posts from a bunch of different sources. I didn't want to have to pull up each news site individually.
2. No comments or noise--just the latest headlines.
3. Customizable - I can add new sources I come across, group them in different ways by subject.
4. Public - If someone else added some interesting news sites, it would be cool to see that and find something new to follow myself.
5. No authentication - Handling passwords and user state is a pain. Just let everyone see everything!
So I made "PaperPup" (the name came from the idea of your dog fetching you the morning paper). While there are other RSS aggregators out there, a lot of them feel clunky to me and don't necessarily have the public aspect I wanted. In technical terms, it's a Rails API backend with a "kind-of-vanilla" HTML/CSS/JQuery single-page front-end. As I mentioned I'm not really a software engineer, so this is nothing fancy; I wanted to make sure my skills on some of the basics were still up-to-date rather than experimenting with whatever the hot new languages/frameworks are these days.
Anyway, I hope you all like it! If you have any suggestions or questions (technical, feature-wise, or other apps to use), I'd love to hear them.
One thing that irked me was the lack of a back functionality. You could use a hash router and just make pages for the categories so one could easily go back to the home page :)
UPDATE: There is a back button now.
yes. exactly
and the whole concept, though simple, is just amazing. A one-stop shop for updates. Great job!
There used to be a browser plug-in (Memeorandum Colors) that did an SVD breakdown of the top 1500-or-so commenting sites and came up with a "line" from Deep-blue to Deep-red (blue, baby-blue, white, pink, red) and would shade every commenter according to their "bias".
https://www.wired.com/2012/04/opinion-baio-site-bias/
It was neat! I liked the site a lot more when the add-on worked. I fixed it for a couple of generations, but FF (which I use) started making it a lot harder to keep up with.
It’ll probably be the next big “feature” I work on.
Otherwise, kudos! Best of luck.