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Show HN: A better way to read blogs
Hey HN, maker here. It was a serious 4-6 months of effort to build this. I have never poured as much love, attention and detail into a project before. So I really appreciate you having a looksie!
The homepage has a fresh list of articles every hour and is open to all. Still, I recommend signing up so you can add stuff to your reading list and follow blogs.
My initial plan was to monetize this with subtle ads, but that didn't work out as the traffic to the site isn't nearly enough for that. That said, I have a fair bit invested in this and I need your help figuring out a way to make this sustainability profitable. If this was yours, what bits would you charge for? Are there any features I could add to a "pro" subscription?
Appreciate any help and support!
- selmetwa 3y agoReally cool, can anyone contribute articles? I made a site recently focused on social bookmarking. https://huntergather.website/ https://huntergather.website/
- gessha 3y agoThe idea of social bookmarking is really cool. Thank you for sharing.
- zerojames 3y agoI like the design of this site! The icons and typography are especially cool! There is a neat idea in here. I already use an RSS social reader (https://monocle.p3k.io/ https://monocle.p3k.io/), but I can see this being a cool firehose to skim that I can curate. Do you offer RSS feeds of feeds on the site? I would love if there was a "simple mode" that let you only see the titles, just like the HN homepage. There is a lot of information on the feed pages and I find it a bit overwhelming. Also, it would be great if I didn't need an account to see the blogs, curators, and popular pages.
- rus20376 3y agoNice! Reminds me of a very early version of Slashdot.
- dsgnr 3y agoThis looks great! I'll make sure to check it out regularly. It brings back memories of old Reddit, and like the old Reddit, it could really benefit from a mobile-friendly design. I'd love to be part of creating that!
- gilli 3y agoThat's a nice way to bring attention to the many interesting blogs that exist.
- giancarlostoro 3y agoThis is really nice, I thought about doing something precisely like this, I'm guessing your are taking advantage of RSS?
- crtxcr 3y agoInteresting, but almost every click on the site requires an account (with an email). I would love to be able to assess it a bit more before creating an account.
- mgsk 3y agoReading the posts doesn't require an account. Seems fair that other functionality (voting, reading list, custom blogs, etc.) would require an account. Edit: I got an account. The "blogs" page is a mix of blogs you follow and default blogs. I guess that shouldn't really need an account to see the default blogs.
- ibdf 3y agoLooks really nice, but asking me for an account after I click on a category is a huge turn off. Why do I need an account?
- thrtythreeforty 3y agoI also think this looks very nice. But I 100% agree, it's off-putting to ask for an account to view something that is clearly already filterable without personalization. It makes it difficult to browse and decide if I want an account. (Imagine if Reddit only let you view the front page without an account. I'd never have touched it!)
- vinaypai 3y agoThis looks great! How do blogs get into the "blogs" tab? I see the "suggest a blog" link... are they all hand-curated from there?
- mgsk 3y agoYeah
- Brajeshwar 3y agoNice. This reminds me of Digg, when it became popular. There were too many of them after Digg's success.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- solardev 3y agoIt's like reddit but without comments?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Pr0ject217 3y agoHmm, the background is way too distracting.
- khet 3y agoFYI: Don't forget to try the keyboard shortcuts!
- outcoldman 3y ago1. Donations 2. Sponsors for the topics. Mark those articles as Sponsored. Let companies only to post sponsored content. And promote them. Obviously you have to limit that seriously to make sure it is not going to take the whole feed.
- RistrettoMike 3y agoSeems cool! I saved a link that looked interesting to me and bookmarked the top-level "About" page so I can spend some more time browsing around sometime soon. Thanks for making something focused on reading & the small web. :)
- dmje 3y agoI really love how it looks, and congrats on getting it live. Immediate feedback: - a page, obviously linked from a banner / menu which describes what this thing is, how it works and who it is for. It may be obvious(ish) to HN but don’t assume anyone else will know what you’re trying to do - more images. - some way of marking stuff read, otherwise you always get the same list - the “in app” reading is interesting, I don’t know how this affects any traffic to included links? You may run into friction if all the reading happens here on your app?
- delusional 3y agoYour background interacts poorly with Dark Reader. I know you're not to blame for that, but I'd imagine some number of your potential user base would be put off on that initially.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wpietri 3y agoI'd strongly suggest you demonstrate more value before you require auth. I looked at the front page and none of the 3 visible articles grabbed me. So I clicked on "blogs" to see if I found anything interesting there. That gave me the registration wall, so I bounced. I'm sure that feels unfair given the work you've put in. But registration is a hassle that people don't go through unless they're expecting at least as much value or have built up a more significant relationship with the site. Especially these days, with endless popups asking for my email and registration walls, I'm strongly habituated to close the window when I see that. In your case it looks like the marginal cost of serving more pages is very low, so I'd make as much as possible public and only require registration for features that need identity. I'd even try letting people vote on articles before registering, as for you that's valuable signal about article quality. As to what I'd pay for, I'm already a NewsBlur subscriber, so I think there's a market for a personal front-end to blogs, the news, and the like. For me the valuable part is keeping track of the hundreds of niche authors I follow, plus knowing what I've read. The discovery component, which you've foregrounded here, isn't very valuable to me, but might make a nice freebie to draw people in.
- khet 3y agoThe articles update every hour, so please check back again. The articles are from blogs that were deemed high quality, but even high quality blogs can churn out filler content. But in general, I think you'll always find one or two really interesting things to read at any given time, if not on the homepage, then on the blogs you follow.
- interestica 3y ago> The articles update every hour, so please check back again. Is that apparent to a user? You want ppl to stick around just a bit longer? Put a countdown clock to your master reset. Get it in their mind to come back and check again. Add just a touch of FOMO.
- Michelangelo11 3y agoSimilar thoughts here. I'm looking for AI-related reading, so I was really interested when I saw you have an #AI tag -- but when I clicked it, I got a registration wall, so I bounced. I'd be happy to register if I used the service regularly, and to pay if it was really good, but asking me to register before I can even see if you have what I want -- a reliably good drip of AI news -- is a total turnoff.
- KronisLV 3y agoI wonder where you're getting all of the blogs from, whether it's just user suggestions or lots of personal favorites. Sounds like a bit of work but I'm glad that people are trying to do that sort of thing and helping others discover more articles! I built the Hacker News Personal Blogs site a while ago, after people shared their blogs in an Ask HN post and then someone compiled those into an OPML file on GitHub (those that had Atom/RSS feeds): https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/ https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/ The List Of Blogs page might be relevant to discover a few more blogs to add, if anything catches your eye. That site of mine is pretty basic and I just threw it together in a day or two because it felt possible, but I hope that your site actually goes somewhere in comparison! Also, embedding the blogs inside of iframes is pretty cool, I wonder how common people preventing that with X-Frame-Options or frame-ancestors is. It was actually interesting to see posts from Substack and other sites being captured as screenshots instead, as a workaround.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- davepeck 3y agoThis is neat, thanks. I was looking at your HN OPML file on GitHub [0] and noticed that the `xmlURL` and `htmlURL` attributes are the same for each entry; the `htmlURL` currently points to the feed rather than the site. Do you happen to have the original HTML URLs available? Would be nice to have both. (Secondarily, I'm guessing some of the `type` attributes should probably be "atom" rather than "rss"?) [0] https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs/blob/master/list.opml https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs/blob...
- KronisLV 3y ago> I was looking at your HN OPML file on GitHub [0] and noticed that the `xmlURL` and `htmlURL` attributes are the same for each entry; the `htmlURL` currently points to the feed rather than the site. Do you happen to have the original HTML URLs available? Would be nice to have both. (Secondarily, I'm guessing some of the `type` attributes should probably be "atom" rather than "rss"?) I'm just using the file that someone else made, but I guess they didn't really make the distinction between those URLs in the code, though it shouldn't be too hard to modify: https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs/blob/master/main.go#L106 https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs/blob... It is also true that there are both RSS, Atom and possibly other feed types mixed in there. What I did for my site was to crawl through all of those feeds and process them one by one: get all of the posts, do some ordering and grouping and output everything as RSS feeds in a consistent format. For example, here's the top 100 user feeds for 2023: https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/feed-top100.xml https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/feed-top100.xml Those have HTML links for each of the posts, though I'm afraid it's not exactly what you're asking for (the HTML URLs for the sites/feeds themselves), because I don't actually store that anywhere in my case, though the original feeds of the sites should have that information too.
- ydant 3y agoYour email for verifying email address fails on Fastmail's spam rules: X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 3.0 X-Spam-known-sender: no ("Email failed DMARC policy for domain") X-Spam-sender-reputation: 500 (none) X-Spam-score: 5.2 X-Spam-hits: BAYES_20 -0.001, HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS 0.249, ME_HAS_VSSU 0.001, ME_QUARANTINE 5, ME_SC_NH -0.001, ME_SENDERREP_NEUTRAL 0.001, RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE -0.0001, SPF_HELO_NONE 0.001, SPF_PASS -0.001, UNPARSEABLE_RELAY 0.001, LANGUAGES unknown, BAYES_USED user, SA_VERSION 3.4.6 X-Spam-source: IP='143.55.232.5', Host='pc232-5.mailgun.net', Country='US', FromHeader='biz', MailFrom='org' X-Spam-charsets: plain='utf-8' Clicking the link the first time gave me a default nginx: 502 Bad Gateway nginx/1.22.0 (Ubuntu) The link worked the second time.
- HaZeust 3y agoThis is just the kind of thing I've been looking for! Between techemails, Researchgate, and tons of random compilations of people's own blogs; I've really been looking for something that empowers a distribution of people's best-found blog articles. Will be adding this to my Daily Firefox startup window, and contribute when I can - thanks for sharing!
- gsuuon 3y agoI'm not sure why, but the patterned background is making the text more difficult for me to focus on or read - I'd like to try this out but I'm struggling to even get through a sentence. Otherwise the design aesthetic is nice!
- interestica 3y agoBreak up the vertical flow with some sort of visual anchors -- else it all becomes a blur for what's a too-long list. That's your chance at this stage to educate/sell to your user: tell them what the heck this site is.
- PaulHoule 3y agoLove the integrated reader, that is something Tildes and YOShInOn are really missing.
- pcthrowaway 3y agoVery cool! Also the first time I've come across https://maxbittker.github.io/broider/ https://maxbittker.github.io/broider/ being used in the wild (for the border effect of the navbar). This was previously discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34553190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34553190 for anyone interested
- conductr 3y agoBased on feedback here, sounds like you hit on something. I’d keep it free and open as long as possible to see if you can build up usage. This has no value until it does, so you’re locking people out too early with the required regulation stuff.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoWell I went to the trouble of registering after clicking Discover only to find that there is no search function, no way of filtering other than a predefined set of "hash tags".
- dang 3y agoRelated: Show HN: A Google Reader-inspired RSS reader - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35402979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35402979 - April 2023 (58 comments) It's probably too soon for a follow-up Show HN unless there's something significantly different here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mraza007 3y agoLooks clean and nice. I really like the UI
- littlekey 3y agoAdding another data point here from someone who clicked away after hitting the registration wall. Free or not, it's just not something I want to do before getting a solid sense of the product's value. Let me explore your work for a while and then decide to sign up on my own.
- retox 3y agoAre you stealing peoples content or are the articles submitted to you?
- logN_2 3y agoSo how are you embedding websites without an iframe? I'm guessing your acting as a proxy? How do you know not to proxy say amazon.com? whitelist? I see on some sites are screenshots.