Thanks for posting the app. I wish more arc apps would pop up like this.
Some things I noticed beyond the obvious buttons being buttons:
It would be nice to have some default or optional filters so porn feeds and such can be filtered.
I am still trying to figure out if it works as it supposed to or not. The site says to input your favorite
site or blogger, so I put in the following sites/cases and here are the results:
http://arclanguage.org -> Hmm, this may suck....
http://arclanguage.org/forum -> Hmm, this may suck....
http://arclanguage.org/rss -> Hmm, this may suck....
arclanguage -> Hmm, this may suck....
arclanguage.org -> Hmm, this may suck....
arc language -> found article on arcfn which only talks about arduino
peace -> Aero Snap makes Australian Open TV cameo
http://www.google.com/finance -> TurboTax 2009 Discounts For Early Birds
My Money Blog (nothing to do with google)
So is this expected? If so why?
Also... A few times I tried the page stopped responding or took a really long time.
Yes I noticed the timeouts in the logs. I'm going to look into that.
Arc language forum wasn't in the feeds I crawled (I should have checked this one term, d'uh!), so the program doesn't know anything about, hence the 'this may suck' message.
Peace: I'm trying to be smarter than just matching on keywords. That didn't pay off here.
with google.com/finance, it tried to find finance news. It's smart enough to know that that URL isn't about google.. will you try that station again, vote on a few stories, tell me what you thought?
Will you try out a few more blog/site titles? I'd love to get the coverage of my crawler stress-tested like this :) Thanks for trying it out like this.
Re the porn feeds: I'm just not going there. I noticed one feed that had slipped through in the logs this morning, and I've deleted it, so it shouldn't show up again.
thx - that's what I had in mind -> to filter them out. I should have chosen my words more carefully. :) I was kinda shocked to see the link pass by in the ticker bar. Though I must admit I did click the link just to make sure it was what I thought it was.... consider it testing. :) lol.
Yeah, I thought the "like," "love!" etc. were a bit weird-looking myself at first, even if they were nicely minimalistic.
Since this is functionally the same as a system that rates things from 0 to 3 stars (or 1 to 4 stars, although I don't like 1-to-4 'cause it fools me into thinking there's a 50%), I think actual stars would be a less surprising interface. That would also be nicer to red-green colorblind users.
On another note, I may have found a few bugs. (In case you're keeping a log, my seed for this session was "emshort.wordpress.com". I'm not using the feedback feature, 'cause I don't know if that's buggy too!) I went through several pages I don't remember, pressed the older and newer buttons, and ended up finding a link to "Notion Ink Adam tablet hands on (Pixel Qi Display)" in my recent activity even though I hadn't seen that yet. All I can guess is that either it was someone else's recent activity or else it was what I was going to get had I clicked past the article I was at. Since I couldn't press "newer" (naturally, since I don't have any history newer than the present), I pressed "older" dozens and dozens of times and annoyed myself, and then I rated the tablet article, and suddenly I realized I could press "newer" and started to do that. I expected to annoy myself again, but instead I guess I pressed the button too fast or a packet got lost or something, 'cause the loading graphic came on and stayed there. The loading graphic wasn't centered either; personally, I think that's a bug. :-p Finally, I forwarded a copied and pasted this writeup into the feedback form and sent it off along with a link to this post (so you know you can reply to me here).
Ah, I figured out the problem - the history requests were shared across all users, so if somebody else makes a request while you're browsing, you see the history for their station when you hit older or newer
:}
(This is, of course, in addition to the failed request at the end, and the layout issues)
Thanks guys for checking out readwarp. I was aware when I posted that it was kinda off-topic, especially since there was no code. But a) a lot of my recent code submissions have grown out of this project so I figured I should show y'all what I've been up to; and b) I was feeling a bit at loose ends after getting it to this point, and wanted some sort of feedback to keep myself going. I figured this was a small and friendly community to try out before I get the hordes at HN at it (I think I'll hold off based on y'all's feedback). As I'd hoped I feel motivated again after seeing the comments :) So thanks!
The buttons totally need to look like buttons. I didn't ever think of the 'minimalistic look' as a feature :)
I don't think it's off-topic at all, if I had an arc app to show this is the first place I'd post it ...
I tried dilbert.com and it showed me today's comic, but the older/newer links didn't do anything. Dailyshow.com ... "this sucks", it showed me a page from Onion instead, and likewise, older/newer didn't do anything.
It didn't occur to me until I mouseovered that the coloured strips were supposed to be clickable, I thought they were just decoration.
Much better. When I revisited I went much further and clicked through those option buttons. Since then I noticed one more thing: The space on the left side showing the history fluctuates in size quite a bit and only takes advantage of a third of the vertical space my screen has available. The fluctuating size forces me to chase the <older and newer> links as they move around the screen. Might I suggest moving the older/newer nav links to the top area so they remain in a fixed position, then allow the history to fill to the bottom of the webpage. My 2 cents :).
[Edit: or even have the links both atop and bottom]
I added pagination links to the top, and made it 25 links per page. Since there's links at the top I'm less concerned about requiring scrolling to paginate :) Thanks for the suggestion.
I think there's a bug. I ran finance from home yesterday ->
http://readwarp.com/station?seed=finance# and stepped through the history section. On my lunch hour today I gave the same input... and the same history is still there. Given I don't have a user account and I am at a different IP, I think everyone get a shared history.
Earlier you posted...
"so if somebody else makes a request while you're browsing, you see the history for their station when you hit older or newer.."
I don't think anyone one else made this request while I was browsing and these are the links from yesterday.
That quote was a bug report, and it was already fixed at the time of writing :)
The way it works right now: stations are distinct, and have their own history, but are shared across users. The fact that the same history is still there just means that nobody else used the finance station in the meantime. Am I misunderstanding something?
Why don't we take this offline? My email is in my profile. If you send me email I can set you up with a user account. It's extremely unpolished, but you'll be able to import your own feeds and so on.
This goes for anyone else reading this, btw. Send me email and I'll set you up with your own private feedreader on readwarp.
I think it's great that there are more arc web apps out there. Having said that, I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out what the site does or even how to navigate around. I do get the sense that something complicated is going on in the background, but I am not sure what the benefit is.
If you'd like feedback (at least an opinion) on how to make the site stronger, let me know.
Thanks idoh, I should have said something about what I'm trying to do.
I've been using feedreaders for about 4 years, but I still remember that I went past the RSS icon several-score times before I figured out what it meant and how I should use it. I think the notion of subscribing is a huge reason feedreaders haven't caught on in the mainstream. So goal #1: to give the benefit of feedreaders - one place to read - to lay users without requiring them to create subscriptions. On readwarp you just vote on what you like, and you get subscribed to feeds behind the scenes.
Even if you understand feedreaders, they have several issues. First, since they sort by time, one high-volume feed can swamp others. This implicitly gives people an incentive to post more frequently rather than with higher quality (http://akkartik.name/blog/2009-05-19-21-30-46-soc). Second, feedreaders today look too much like my inbox. At some number of feeds google reader starts to seem like work, and I start skimming rather than reading. So goal #2: to be fair to all my feeds, to eliminate the sense of 'falling behind', and to force me to not skim. The current UI forces me to focus on one story at a time, even if I hit the red button within 3s of looking at a story.
Goal #3 is to be less concerned with social recommendations than, say, stumbleUpon. Reddit tried to do recommendations by clustering users, and it failed partly because we all have such diverse interests, just because I overlap with you on programming doesn't mean I overlap with you on indian news. A special-case of 'not being social' is to not be concerned with what's popular. What we all read should drive what's popular, not the other way around. But lots of sites today will just show you what's popular, simply because that's easy to do. When we all tend to read what's popular, the people who read a lot end up disproportionately influencing what we read. No conspiracy theory here, I just want us to make more independent reading choices, and I think that'll improve our level of discourse and make the world a better place.
The implication of goal #3 is that I use more text mining than graph algorithms to make recommendations. I'll prob factor in recommendations from your friends at some point, but it'll just be one signal among many to decide what you should read. The program currently is about 4k lines of arc. Much is going on behind the scenes that the current UI doesn't really expose. There's algorithms to prioritize your feeds based on affinity with other stories you said you liked. Subscription isn't boolean but grey-scale. But the current UI doesn't separate multiple users, and it's trying to minimize how much you tell me about yourself. If you'd like to try out a feedreader personalized to your tastes, send me an email. I'll import your feeds for you, and you can try out my algorithms to prioritize your feeds.
Any feedback y'all have is most appreciated. I applied to YC with this last time, and I've applied this time as well. Wish me luck!
Hi Kartik - Small world, I remember you presenting this at SuperHappyDevHouse 30. Nice to see you plugging away on it. My friend presented a joint project of ours during the same lightning talk, lawnelephant (a site that just took feature requests and implemented them).
I'll give your product a try - just shoot me an email at idoh@idoh.com. I'm not sure it is for me though - I like the google reader layout, because I like reading all of the feeds from one source and then switching to another, e.g. read everything from daring fireball and then read avc.
"I like reading all of the feeds from one source and then switching to another"
That's the sort of thing that would be a trivial change for readwarp. I've received this feedback a couple of times, and have been mulling a 'more from this feed' button.
Let's take this offline. Why don't you shoot me an email? (address in my profile)
