June 3rd, 2006
by NathanWhat’s going on here?
Hi there, welcome to the Newshutch blog. You probably know by now that Newshutch is a web-based news feed reader. If Newshutch is your first feed reader, congratulations! Getting the information you care about is about to become much easier. You won’t have to repeatedly check your favorites to see what’s new; what’s new will just come to you.
If you already use another news reader why should you switch?
Reader run-around
There are plenty of free and excellent desktop newsreaders, but their flaw is that they are tied to the computer they are installed on. When I went back and forth between work and home computers, I couldn’t sync my feed list and read or unread status without laboriously exporting everything, carrying the data on a USB drive, and importing everything. If I didn’t do everything just right every time, the system broke down. I also had to keep both installations of my newsreader up to date, and using Windows at work and a Mac at home was not an option.
Yuck.
Into the breach
The obvious solution is a web based newsreader. Today there are dozens of them out there, but they all seem to have the same problems:
- Tiny, hard to read fonts.
- An overwhelming number of links and irrelevant features.
- As feeds are added the interface becomes noisier. Using your reader becomes a chore instead of fun.
- “Normal” people (non web developers) see the front page of other newsreaders and say “huh?”
With Newshutch we’ve done our best to solve these problems, but we can always do better. That’s why we’ll listen to you on this blog and in our user forums. Thanks for giving Newshutch a try, we think you’ll like it.
June 19th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Two pieces of information you might find useful; I encourage you to delete this comment once you’ve read it.
#1: You should probably have some mechanism for receiving feedback and bug reports; I’m resorting to this comment because I couldn’t locate any other method of contacting you (other than harassing your gal, Doug — heh)
#2: Found a potential bug. Here are the steps to reproduce:
1. Sign up for a new account.
2. From the “Popular Feeds” list, add a new feed (I added Dilbert).
3. From the “Popular Feeds” list, add another new feed (I added BoingBoing).
4. From the “Popular Feeds” list, re-add the 1st feed (I added Dilbert again).
Bug: I am allowed to add the feed twice; it now appears twice in my Read and Manage lists, one after the other.
That bug aside, great work, guys — nice to see it up and running.
June 20th, 2006 at 11:03 am
Thanks for your feedback Dave. I’d like a public database, but they all seem to be too big for us. We have a forum which I think most normal people are more comfortable with, but you probably didn’t see it because we only have a small link to it buried in a paragraph somewhere.
I figure we’ll just take feedback wherever people feel like leaving it, blog comments, forum, email, whatever.
BTW, thanks for the bug report
June 20th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
Dood looks cool! I’m not sure how I feel about the “mark as read” blue thing that comes up in the corner everytime i mouse down the page. But i like the lay out a lot, simple, clean, easy. it’s A+ yo.
June 20th, 2006 at 6:38 pm
Thanks Annie, we’re working on the “mark as read” thing.
June 22nd, 2006 at 7:08 pm
Took a quick look and it looks great! The colors are great, font’s a good size, I can see myself using this as my default. If I have comments as I use it more, I will definitely let you know.
July 6th, 2006 at 8:03 am
How often do you servers refresh the feeds
July 6th, 2006 at 10:34 am
A @ 8:03am, the feeds are updated every 30 minutes.
July 6th, 2006 at 11:20 am
How much history of feeds is kept, eg If I don’t look at newshutch for a few days or week will I still get all info published previously ? I noticed there is no filter
July 6th, 2006 at 11:39 am
A, right now feed entries will expire after several weeks or after they fall off the publisher’s RSS feed. We are working on date filters and other ways to keep or discover older items, but for the first release we focused on putting out a working newsreader with a focus on fresh items.
July 6th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
By default they are updated every 30 minutes but we do honor RSS explicit TTL values. For instance, the Yahoo News feed is specified to update every five minutes, so we do it
There is going to be a simple date filter, hopefully in the next release (perhaps this weekend)
July 7th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
I like it so far. The fonts are excellent. One thing though that I wish I could do is check an article as ‘don’t mark as read’. This way I can click the button and move to the next feed and everything except those that I’ve marked will become read.
I skim a lot and need to come back to read longer articles in more depth. The only way to currently do this is do the inverse and leave the ones I wan alone and mark all the others read one by one. Not efficient.
Rock on.
July 9th, 2006 at 10:54 am
Many of my imported feeds don’t show. It displays “There are no entries in this feed.”
Most of the feeds that you don’t display are actually good, a few are bad. All feeds that you don’t display are listed with thier URL, not thier title. When I click on one it removes itself from the list, but only after I click on another one, and I have to refresh to get it back. I clicked on some of these feeds last night and they all showed “There are no entries in this feed”, but now today some are showing items, but the name is still the URL and not the title. I can enter the feed URL manually and it will work OK, the title and item counts both show, the problem seems to be related to the fact that it was imported via OPML.
You can check them out yourself at
OPML at http://pics.ww.com/d/17462-1/SAGE_sharity_opml
a few I know that work:
http://chocoreve.blogspot.com/atom.xml
http://lostinthe80s.blogspot.com/atom.xml
http://majazzotheque.over-blog.com/atom.php
You can add the first two manually and everythings fine, when I add the third the input box and add button go gray and stay tha way and I can’t add anything more. If I refresh the add button comes back but the input box stays gray.
rickdog
July 9th, 2006 at 10:56 am
your comment poster is not working, I submitted two and they were dumped into the bit bucket.
July 9th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
Just want to say, that Neshutch is really cool apps. Good job!
July 9th, 2006 at 9:18 pm
I use Google Reader. But so far I like this enough to consider switching. I like to read in chronological order. How about an option to put oldest at the top?
July 10th, 2006 at 12:38 am
Realy nice app. I like the simplicity and the speed.
One feature I would realy enjoy is the posibility to view read items in a feed. Beside that, everything is cool. I am considering switching from Bloglines.
July 10th, 2006 at 11:26 am
Cristi,
There is a checkbox at the bottom of your feedlist to “only show unread items”. If you uncheck that, then both read and unread items will display.
July 10th, 2006 at 11:36 am
Simon,
That’s a good idea. We want to avoid “featuritus”, we just need a way to add features without forcing users to make a decision until they want or need to.
I could never get into Google reader. In fact the reason Doug and I built Newshutch was because none of the web based readers really worked for us. They were either too lightweight (Kinja), or way too heavy (Bloglines). What would make you switch away from Google reader?
July 10th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
Nathan,
Thank you for the tip.
Btw, realy nice app. I have to say that today was a test drive, I used newshutch as my default rss reader and I am going to stick with it. I like it a lot. Great job.
July 12th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
Sorry about your lost posts rickdog, you got flagged as spam by Akismet and I wasn’t notified.