The Webpage, an online RSS reader and news aggregator, styled like a newspaper

[arussellsaw]

Hello! author here, i just wanted to address a few things i've seen in the comments:

* i absolutely built this for fun, it's an idea i had late at night and needed to scratch that itch

* the scolling sucks, laying out arbitrarily sized articles into a given layout is a challenge, and the scrolling hides a lot of the sins. I'm going to switch to truncating articles this evening, and linking to a single article page.

* thanks for the suggestions on hyphenation, i've been playing with a few different approaches but none have worked with all the browsers i tried, i'll give a few suggestions a go this evening!

[k1m]

Love to see experiments like this with web articles. Have you thought about making it more print focused? It's the kind of layout I'd want to print out and read offline.

I've experimented a little with trying to create more readable, printable layouts of web articles and feeds on https://www.fivefilters.org [1],[2] but yours has a much more traditional newspaper look which could look great in print.

[1] Simple Print for single articles https://pdf.fivefilters.org/simple-print/

[2] PDF from feed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=854Csokl3QA

[exclipy]

Love it! It's great to see web design finally start to scale to large and wide screens. I hope this is the start of a movement.

Have you seen pressreader.com's layout? eg. https://thewashingtonpost.pressreader.com/the-washington-pos...

They have some really nice ideas, implemented well. See for example how the articles click to expand. And the horizontal scrolling there works so well with the columns!

[bovermyer]

Have you tried using a CSS "masonry" approach to address the varying sizes of the articles?

For example: https://w3bits.com/css-masonry/

[alberth]

I loved the NYTimes "Times Reader", circa 2008, when it was released.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/packages/html/fi...

You might want to look into it for design inspiration since the NYTimes solved for a lot of design problems I'm sure you've had to tackle/consider.

Great work btw.

[richardboegli]

@arussellsaw - might want to have a closer look at this [0] for some inspiration

[0] https://wwweeebbb.com/

[chris_st]

Wow, what a great idea, and largely fantastic implementation! It really looks good.

Do RSS feeds have "just" text that you pull to get the article content, or are you parsing the webpage somehow? If so, how?

I've done something slightly (well, about 1% :-) similar for the "Popular" page on pinboard[0]. It used to have a line or two from the start of the article, using a webpage content extractor that got turned off, so I can't use it anymore.

One arguably nice thing about mine is that it's updated once a day, and it remembers what you've read yesterday, so new articles are marked, and you can flip a switch to see the new stuff first.

Thanks!

[0] https://pbpb.cls.cloud

[rodolphoarruda]

I showed this to my old father and he laughed for a long 1 minute. It was really an unexpected surprise.

[hinkley]

> I'm going to switch to truncating articles this evening, and linking to a single article page.

Ah, much better now.

Paper newspapers do this in spades, so this behavior shouldn’t surprise most people.

I hate to say his, but you might have to turn on justification to make it look more paper-like. In doing so you can get rid of many of the vertical separator lines (but you might need to be more conservative with max columns)

[bryanrasmussen]

if it's supposed to be laid out like a newspaper shouldn't it use column-count etc. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/01/css-multiple-column...

It seemed like everything was flex? maybe I'm wrong, and I missed it somewhere?

[MarkusQ]

This is awesome!

Now if you could just get an AI to rewrite the content to bring it up to the old (roughly pre-"USA Today") journalistic standards, it would be perfect!

But that's probably too much to ask.

[vagab0nd]

This is exactly what I've been looking for. Thanks! Other than scrolling it looks really good.

Do you use any framework for the frontend? If so, could you open source it?

[ghego1]

I love the scrolling! My first thought was "finally a way to read the whole rss feed without the need to click on a link". I'd keep it that way.

Also, I think that the scrolling feature is one of the most innovative things I've seen in many years on how to format articles on the web. It makes a lot of sense to be honest IMH.

[jaydouken]

This is awesome! Love the idea, do you intend to make this a bigger project?

[chrismatheson]

I think it’s awesome :)

[chrismorgan]

The content is wrapping at every character, rather than on word boundaries or with hyphenation.

The relevant styles:

  .subcol {
    hyphens: auto;
    word-break: break-all;
  }

`word-break: break-all` should be replaced with `overflow-wrap: break-word`. Those two properties are quite subtle in their meaning and interactions.

[gedy]

Also toss in for full effect:

    text-align: justify;
    -webkit-hyphens: auto; /* Safari */

[rob74]

Looks cool, just one suggestion about the photos: that effect looks like the dithering of a dot matrix printer and not like a newspaper photo, for that I would go with this kind of effect: https://i.pinimg.com/474x/9d/76/f0/9d76f0c303e7ea8352d10465d... - I think it's called a "screening" effect?

[xori]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halftone

They used to generate this by holding a "screen" up to create the grid.

[mv4]

I like this.

[rchaud]

I remember the Wall Street Journal's tablet apps having a layout just like this, so it resembled their broadsheet look. It was a pleasure to read, as clicking on individual stories took you to the full story, still laid out like a newspaper, and not to their website inside of a web wrapper view.

For whatever reason, they changed that and now the app looks like their website, except with more ads and tracking.

[metabagel]

You might have to be a subscriber to access it, but I suggest taking a look at the L.A. Times enewspaper for inspiration. It’s like a full color scan of the newspaper. If you click in an article, you are taken to a separate page to read the article in full.

https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/latimes/default.aspx...

[jsmith45]

Wow. clearly designed only for touch screens. Needing to click and drag the mouse to pan on a desktop is absolutely terrible.

[ape4]

Could work nicely with that eink project that was showing the NY Times full size. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22831323

[wtmt]

Not sure if I’d use it with the scrolling, since this format is ill suited for smaller screens, but I love this idea!

One more suggestion for you to consider: a variant where each article is a link that takes the reader to a separate article page (like a normal web page) may be good. The use case is to have this print layout to skim through headlines and snippets, and dig into an article by itself if one wants to read more (and the article doesn’t fit within the non-scrolling area).

[jrochkind1]

I'm interested in the concept, but I think the execution needs some improvement to be comfortable. For instance, no actual online newspaper right now has internal scrollbars; there are probably reasons for this.

Online newspapers look something like print newspapers, but the most successful designs are successful at adapting the design for the particular affordances of the screen. (Granted, internal scrollbars ARE something you can't do in print, unique to the screen! They just aren't, I think, something anyone wants...)

[ahuth]

This is really cool! It would be nice to see h tags used for article headings. That way people using assistive technology can navigate around faster.

And this may be a good opportunity to use the article tag.

[btbuildem]

Newspapers have margins!

[Aeolun]

This seriously needs some paragraph breaks in the articles. Every article reads like one huge sentence.

I think print newspapers do this with a slight indent to every paragraph.

[jaspax]

"RSS Feeds for the 20th Century" feels pretty dated. I want to see "RSS Feeds for the 19th Century".

[tetrisgm]

Love the idea. Really hard to navigate and read, because content ends up in little boxes. But I love it as a bit of fun!

[anigbrowl]

I do not hate it despite its limitations

[neilsense]

I got caught out by the nested scrolling

[heinrichhartman]

Pretty sure it violates copyright of the publishers.

Given that Google is not allowed to show more than the headline and a few words in their search results in the EU, I suspect this is just plain illegal.

This is sad. We should have better laws. Hope you don't get sued.

EDIT: Please let me know if my understanding is incorrect.

[saadalem]

Woooooooooooooooooow. I could be downvoted, but I can't say nothing other than that. WELL DONE !

[donohoe]

If you can't say anything nice don't say anything at all :)

That said; I've been on HN long enough where news sites (some of which I worked at) took this approach on some products where they directly took print-styles and applied them digitally. They were vocally criticized (rightly so) for completely mis-understanding the new digital medium.

This is a fun and interesting project - buts its entirely unusable and provides a very poor reading experience.

Among many other points, it misses the point that the full-page physical newspaper was entirely scannable in large areas. This is the opposite of that.

Kudos to the developer trying something for fun but I hope this isn't a serious approach to reading news.

[metabagel]

The L.A. Times has a really polished version of this, which I sometimes prefer over the regular articles. It has the effect of a full color scan of the entire newspaper. If you click in an article, you are taken to a standalone page for reading. You might have to be a subscriber to access it.

[catacombs]

> Kudos to the developer trying something for fun but I hope this isn't a serious approach to reading news.

Author literally said he did this for fun.

[gregoire]

Reminds me of this old Mac and iPad app: https://acrylicapps.com/pulp/

[chadlavi]

Would love to be able to use a personalizable version of this