A story of a feed reader
This little Year of Build journey I've been on has caused me to realize something: I have all the tools I need to break some shackles. I'm not limited to just building little apps and shortcuts to make my life more efficient. I can build some replacements for apps I use on the daily, too.
An app I love dearly is Reeder, an RSS feed reader built solely for Apple platforms. There are distinct versions available for iPhone, iPad and Mac. What Reeder doesn't have, however, is a web version. I'm not always on a Mac when using a PC, so this is a pain point for me.
I decided to do something about it.
The evolution of this app has been sort of funny. I originally went into this project with the goal of resurrecting Google Reader from the dead. Hence the name you'll see in some places (which will change at some point): Feedux.
Then I started using it. I realized I've changed a lot since my GReader days. What I want in the present day isn't so much a utility but, instead, an experience. I want a really nice reading experience that's more about living inside the content and not blazing through it. An attempt to translate this Google Reader-like to mobile only drove the point home even more: this approach ain't it.
Back to the drawing board.
I wanted something nice to look at, but something that didn't distract too much from the star of the show, which is the content. Some things on my wish list:
- A "Today" view for articles published today
- Options that get out of the way
- As much full, meaning not-truncated, content as possible
Here is the very simple thing I landed on.
Now I'll admit... this thing does have a bit of a neat little party trick. Remember what I said earlier about full content? Well:
It'll go get it.
Not perfectly yet. There's still work to do here. Mozilla's Readability, despite being very cool, is not an absolute miracle worker. But it'll get there.
This is something I'm going to try and not use a whole lot, however, because I'd like to put a premium on feeds that actually include the whole of their content to start.
Enter some of what's behind the curtain:
Pardon the very-much-in-progress settings UI. But, behold! I've implemented a sort of feed library — a discovery tool. And it's built to suss out which feeds are partial and which feeds are providing full content.
My own personal goal, once I settle into using this as my own personal reader, is to populate a larger number of feeds in the backend and shoot for a "majority-full" life.
The only reason I haven't is that I still haven't quite gotten the "Today" view where I want it yet. I want it to be clean and simple. I also want a small touch of "show me what I want right now." That's the Rubik's Cube I'm still twisting around. I experimented with a "Top Stories" section that parsed entities from headlines and scored convergence to establish five big ones. After three days straight of "Super Bowl," I realized that wasn't my best idea.
Anyway, I'll keep cracking away on this. In the meantime:
Railblaze (what I might have referred to as Conductor or Railtime or something before) is still getting some polish. I added buses. I also spun up my own push notification service to keep my Live Activities... alive.
And there's a very simple web version you can mess around with over at https://railblaze.nyc. That is subway only.
That's that for now. I'm well over the three I should be at for projects so far this year. There'll be more.
