Suspected PayPal Hackers Seek Deal To Stay Out Of Prison
2 Men Arrested After Teen Was Run Over For His iPad
NewsBlur is a slick, impressive, undocumented RSS reader
NewsBlur is a very beautiful feed reader that's laden with tons of JavaScript, but it utterly lacks any form of documentation.
It's an open source project by the talented Samuel Clay, who has been working on it for 15 months now. He's currently working on an iPhone version, but the regular version is very impressive in itself.
The sources are hosted over on GitHub, and the project uses the Django Web framework for Python. This means that you can probably install it on your own server and break free from the big G. But unlike Fever, which is another server-based reader, NewsBlur has built-in multi-user support, and it's free. So, you don't have to install it on your own server to use it; you can just go to the NewsBlur site and open an account.
NewsBlur lets you import your current feeds from Google Reader. It lets you vote articles up and down, and it uses your input to figure out what you might like to read in the future. It then marks articles appropriately so that you can (hopefully) read just the stuff that you're interested in out of the sea of RSS feeds that you've been reading.
To really see if the intelligence works, you have to use it for a while, which is something I haven't done. This is a very impressive project, but I feel that the lack of documentation (not even an About page) is holding it back. I would have given you a complete screenshot tour of it, but it's very difficult when you don't know what anything does.
Comments
7
Subscribe to commentssamuelAug 23rd 2010 4:13PM
No documentation! That's the idea. It should be so simple to use that you don't need hand-holding. That's how I built it, anyhow.
I'll work on those static pages so it feels friendlier. :-)
samuelAug 23rd 2010 4:36PM
You can delete feeds, but I didn't want to complicate the UI (like Google Reader). So you have to open the feed, then use the manage menu to delete it.
As for Fark (holy cow, I used to read Fark daily, ten-some years ago), I'm not sure why it would be failing. I'll look into it after this avalanche from DownloadSquad. (Of which I am very, very thankful.)
MxxConAug 23rd 2010 7:10PM
would be really cool if it could actually somehow synchronize read/unread with my google reader...to use this as a frontend to google reader
i also don't quiet understand the logic of focus jumping between articles when i use spacebar..seems like for no appearnt reason it jumps a few articles down then jumps back up
samuelAug 23rd 2010 9:49PM
Soon, keyboard shortcuts (like the spacebar) will be configurable.
As for syncing with Google Reader, it's all or nothing. There's so much logic going on at NewsBlur, it wouldn't make much sense to use both. The good news is that I'm continually improving NewsBlur, fixing the bugs that cause grief, and writing new features that make many of us very happy. So it might be worthwhile to try out both for a while, or just switch cold turkey and see how you like it.
Just know that if you have any issues, I'm very receptive to fixing bugs and improving the experience. Including that space bar issue. What site is it?
MxxConAug 23rd 2010 10:02PM
there's gotta be a way to sync :(
how does FeedDemon syncs with google reader? even google themselves promoted feeddemon and its ability to sync..
it seems unlikely that they would do it the brute-force way of just loading regular webpage in the background..
i'm trying to reproduce that spacebar skip behavior and obviously it doesn't seem to be happening now :)
samuelAug 23rd 2010 10:31PM
Apps like FeedDemon are front-ends to Google's back-end. NewsBlur is end-to-end, meaning that everything from the front-end to the feed data itself is on NewsBlur's servers. (Ahem, server, singular, for now.)
FeedDemon can't do the AI parsing that I have planned for NewsBlur. They can do some of the explicit classifiers, but the implicit classifiers can only be done on the back-end, which means if Google doesn't do it, good luck getting all of that juicy feed data and parsing it yourself.
The only real way to get the read states to sync would be to setup a very expensive syncer, which would be prone to error. And if you're using a feed reader, you are unlikely to be using two different feed readers. NewsBlur will have an iPhone app soon, and if things go well, maybe an API so companies like FeedDemon can build on top of NewsBlur's rich, intelligently filtered data. One day.
BarosAug 29th 2010 8:48AM
Layout is good but definitely needs much more in terms of usability. Google Reader with Google Redesigned is still my go to news reader.
for Newsblur to become my go to news reader it definitely needs to support list view without any details other than the feed headline. the fact that i cant close the preview pane is very annoying. But since its a part of ur layout u can stick with it. i hope to see an option to actually disable the preview pane. currently u can minimize the list pane... so just do the reverse too.?