I think my favorite part is just how short some of these articles really are once you remove all the nonsense and extra crap in the web pages.
Some articles are actually... 8 sentences. That is it. How on earth does it then take 10 seconds to scroll and parse all the fake inserts to finally realize that this is a poorly researched snippet masquerading as news...
> I think my favorite part is just how short some of there articles are...
In an attempt to enjoy this effect more broadly, I have Reader Mode set to enabled by default on Safari mobile.
On Firefox desktop I often use the Reader View button on news stories. There is an extension to enable this by default, but I have a hard time trusting browser add-ons.
It’s reasonable to have short articles in a newspaper, where you want to fit in a bunch of short factual stories, or on a newswire where you just want to quickly send out some facts before competitors. In the former case you just put lots of stories on one page. In the latter case, it’s often expected to be short.
Nostaliga really kicked in here - seeing things like this for the first time, and feeling the unfurling of the future and a thousand new ideas in front of you, one so new and beyond all of your sci-fi expectations, and yet so real.
I feel so incredibly fortunate to have been old enough to see and understand the start of all of this, and later, to be a part of all of it.
I don’t think I had any feelings of nostalgia related to this at all, even though it must have been about when I started using the web. I guess I was still too young to get really attched to it.
Great! For even better results, please, set the background-color to `#C0C0C0`. (Netscape default. However, I'm not sure, if this was also the default on Windows, as well.)
Agreed. Blue text on white background is jarring. And I was wondering what the original Netscape Grey was!
Argh. Hoping "Godzilla vs Kong" reviews were going to be better. When will Hollywood learn the secret to a good kaiju film = less humans, more monsters ;)
It's so refreshing to have pages load instantly. Websites get so bogged down with loading resources from 12 different places. It'd be nice if a static webpage was the default and every change that slowed down loading was explicitly laid out to stakeholders in terms of marginal load time and resources required.
I'm curious where the data get fetched from. The Author mentions that Mozilla Readability and SimplePie are used.
Readability to parse the content. SimplePie to fetch the data (I assume). Dat from RSS feeds?
In case you want to make something similar, I recently wrote a blog on where you could get news data for free [1]
(self-promo) I'd recommend to take a look at my Python package to mine news data from Google News [2]. Also, in 3 days we're releasing an absolutely free News API [3] that will support ~50-100k top stories per day.
Thanks for the link. Technical part from that interview:
> On a technical level, the site obtains stories through the existing Google News RSS feed, which are then processed with some PHP trickery. "Google News has a very nice RSS feed, for each topic, language and country. So I thought I could connect to that feed, and write some code to simplify the result way down to extremely basic HTML, targeting only tags available in the HTML 2.0 specification from 1995," said Malseed.
> "So I used a PHP library called SimplePie to import the feed, and wrote some PHP code to simplify the results into a nice front page, using Netscape 2.0.2 on my 1989 Mac SE/30 to make sure it loaded fast and looked nice. The articles were a little more difficult, because they are on all sorts of different news sites with different formatting.
> "So I found that Mozilla has an open-source library called Readability, which is what powers Firefox's reader mode. I used the PHP port of this, and then wrote a proxy that renders articles through Readability, and then I added some code to strip the results down even further to extremely basic HTML."
I assembled a similar decruftifier for the Washington Post specifically, using html-xml-utils (https://www.w3.org/Tools/HTML-XML-utils -- and some sed/awk) to strip only core article content & metadata (head, byline, dateline). Result was typically <5% of original HTML.
I've come to realise that most online commercial publishing does not even use bold within body text, giving another filter trigger for stripping cruft.
[+] [-] darkwizard42|5 years ago|reply
Some articles are actually... 8 sentences. That is it. How on earth does it then take 10 seconds to scroll and parse all the fake inserts to finally realize that this is a poorly researched snippet masquerading as news...
[+] [-] agumonkey|5 years ago|reply
This part of the web makes me so jaded about 'progress' I'm into woodworking now.
[+] [-] consumer451|5 years ago|reply
In an attempt to enjoy this effect more broadly, I have Reader Mode set to enabled by default on Safari mobile.
On Firefox desktop I often use the Reader View button on news stories. There is an extension to enable this by default, but I have a hard time trusting browser add-ons.
[+] [-] dan-robertson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deagle50|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmurphy|5 years ago|reply
I feel so incredibly fortunate to have been old enough to see and understand the start of all of this, and later, to be a part of all of it.
[+] [-] wyclif|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdubs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeolun|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masswerk|5 years ago|reply
Compare this bookmarklet: https://www.masswerk.at/bookmarklets/netscapify/
[+] [-] ArtWomb|5 years ago|reply
Argh. Hoping "Godzilla vs Kong" reviews were going to be better. When will Hollywood learn the secret to a good kaiju film = less humans, more monsters ;)
[+] [-] melicerte|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mambodog|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|5 years ago|reply
Funny that an emulated Mac hates Safari.
[+] [-] debo_|5 years ago|reply
Second impression: instinctively tries scrolling with trackpad _help why isn't it working_
This really made my day, thank you for sharing it.
[+] [-] biggieshellz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yhippa|5 years ago|reply
Edit: also it shows a few key news articles with related articles. This means I'm not infinitely scrolling which is nice.
[+] [-] DavidPeiffer|5 years ago|reply
You may also like http://lite.cnn.com/en
It's so refreshing to have pages load instantly. Websites get so bogged down with loading resources from 12 different places. It'd be nice if a static webpage was the default and every change that slowed down loading was explicitly laid out to stakeholders in terms of marginal load time and resources required.
[+] [-] k1m|5 years ago|reply
https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/nyregio...
[+] [-] artembugara|5 years ago|reply
Readability to parse the content. SimplePie to fetch the data (I assume). Dat from RSS feeds?
In case you want to make something similar, I recently wrote a blog on where you could get news data for free [1]
(self-promo) I'd recommend to take a look at my Python package to mine news data from Google News [2]. Also, in 3 days we're releasing an absolutely free News API [3] that will support ~50-100k top stories per day.
[1] https://blog.newscatcherapi.com/an-ultimate-list-of-open-sou...
[2] https://github.com/kotartemiy/pygooglenews
[3] https://newscatcherapi.com/free-news-api
[+] [-] Thaxll|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fhsm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gripfx|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/29/google_news_netscape_...
[+] [-] k1m|5 years ago|reply
> On a technical level, the site obtains stories through the existing Google News RSS feed, which are then processed with some PHP trickery. "Google News has a very nice RSS feed, for each topic, language and country. So I thought I could connect to that feed, and write some code to simplify the result way down to extremely basic HTML, targeting only tags available in the HTML 2.0 specification from 1995," said Malseed.
> "So I used a PHP library called SimplePie to import the feed, and wrote some PHP code to simplify the results into a nice front page, using Netscape 2.0.2 on my 1989 Mac SE/30 to make sure it loaded fast and looked nice. The articles were a little more difficult, because they are on all sorts of different news sites with different formatting.
> "So I found that Mozilla has an open-source library called Readability, which is what powers Firefox's reader mode. I used the PHP port of this, and then wrote a proxy that renders articles through Readability, and then I added some code to strip the results down even further to extremely basic HTML."
[+] [-] willchis|5 years ago|reply
Best viewed on mobile and you can optionally use a version without images by clicking the link at the top right of the page.
[+] [-] bobajeff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artembugara|5 years ago|reply
Let me know if you have some time
[+] [-] rkagerer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrmann100|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiritplumber|5 years ago|reply
I should make it an option for my own site, and I will! Thank you for the inspiration.
[+] [-] whalesalad|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StreamBright|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FullMetalBitch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kalia35|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway4good|5 years ago|reply
Google news rss seems to be different and is full with amp links:
https://news.google.com/rss?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
[+] [-] Bilal_io|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knodi123|5 years ago|reply
(Also, I thought every page from that era was required to have at least one <blink> tag, and possibly an "Under Construction" image.)
[+] [-] dredmorbius|5 years ago|reply
I've come to realise that most online commercial publishing does not even use bold within body text, giving another filter trigger for stripping cruft.
[+] [-] fermienrico|5 years ago|reply
https://text.npr.org/
Far easier to read since the length of the line is absolutely perfect. Pro tip: https://practicaltypography.com/line-length.html
That said - something is wrong with NPR, a bunch of Lorem Ipsum links :)
[+] [-] drewg123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rocky1138|5 years ago|reply