Old TechCrunch + really fast, clean, customizable layouts

[treematohs]

Unfortunately this doesn't make the quality of the reporting any better.

[redthrowaway]

You'll have to wait for CSS4 for that...

[funkah]

That's what I was thinking. An awful lot of effort for such a bummer of a website.

[nir]

Very cool. Reminds me of an app I once co-built (with the now famous Mr. Bragger ;) that lets you skin an RSS feed with a customizable HTML/CSS template (compatible with Tumblr's template markup)

http://feedvolley.com/ (code: https://github.com/niryariv/FeedVolley ) - could use a little UI love, but pretty stable. If anyone's interested in building this further I'd be happy to help you get started.

[mike-cardwell]

Interesting. It can't seem to find a feed on https://grepular.com/ though. Is that because it's https?

[windsurfer]

Do you mean this was some kind of tumblr template markup to XSLT translator?

[coderdude]

So basically it's all of TechCrunch's content with none of their ability to make money off it. This'll last long.

[_delirium]

It'd be a sort of interesting legal issue if they got sued. Using the name 'tcfast' might be problematic. But what if it was a more general web-based RSS reader that reformatted any RSS feed into pages like this? If that's illegal, where's the line between that and Google Reader?

[pbhjpbhj]

>all of TechCrunch's content

You forgot the illegally duplicated site designs (company livery, possibly trademark infringement, certainly someone would have a poke at passing off, ...).

[a5seo]

ahem, you mean AOL's content. there is a cube in Dulles with the light on tonight with a C&D on the monitor.

[arn]

It's also easy to design a site to load fast without ads or widgets. Redesign TC's site to load fast with the same ads and functionality, and I'll be more impressed.

[toni]

The links on the top bar of an individual article page are in the form of http://tcfast.com/?backTo=/2011/07/14/larry-page-earnings-ca...

But "backTo" parameter also accepts full URLs, so something like http://tcfast.com/?backTo=http://cnn.com/&t=g will happily redirect to CNN.

This might not be desirable for you, because in effect it will transform your site to a free redirect service ready for use by spammers.

You should check the value of "backTo" parameter and redirect only inside your own site.

[tcfast]

thanks. fixed now.

[citricsquid]

There is a reason the majority of news sites (well, any good news site) limits the width of text; wide text is hard to read. Although the HN version that lists everything with just the title is great, but the actual post display is awful, even though it's supposed to be inheriting how HN displays posts it should still be limited :(

[JoshTriplett]

That's a common opinion, yes. Some users prefer to actually take advantage of their screen width to read more content at a time. It also proves particularly convenient when trying to skim for particular information without reading everything.

Part of the justification for using narrow columns relates to the difficulty of finding the starting point of the next line when your eyes jump a large distance to the left. That advice applies quite well to books, and much less well to more structured content. For instance, on Hacker News, most comments don't have a wall of text with no paragraph breaks, and comments have strong delineation, so a narrow text width doesn't actually help.

That said, if you have the type of content for which a narrow text width does help (which TechCrunch sometimes does), please don't limit it to a specific pixel width; please use em instead, so that the width gets larger with the font size. That way, when users hit Ctrl-+ to override a site's smaller-than-the-browser's-default font size, the site will show about the same amount of text on each line, rather than producing narrower lines as the font grows.

[tcfast]

i've limited it to 800px

[runaway]

In past few months or so I've found TC to be unusably slow. I don't know if it's all the ads/tracking/js being loaded but it takes 20 seconds or more for me to be able to actually interact with the page and so I've just stopped reading it. This is a very welcome new way to read it.

[jackolas]

I just loaded the page, the last thing to load: post titles. Simply amazing that they don't see this as an issue.

[ChuckMcM]

Oh that is very very cool. Now Arianna will no doubt sue the crap out of you but still, it makes the site usable which was not something I thought was practical with just reskinning.

[ladon86]

Awesome job! Are you just using the RSS feed?

[tcfast]

rss and google

[mtogo]

I don't read TC much, but this has got to be one of the coolest things i've seen all day.

[noinput]

Nice work. add a ?t=json option and this could get fun.

[Finbarr]

Nice work. I was going to do something very similar and call it bettercrunch.com - you beat me to it.

[jgmmo]

My favorite part is how fast it loads in the HN style compared to normal.

[danielhfrank]

Wow, you just rolled all my most visited sites into one. And now I can read techcrunch again without my brain melting. Actually, that might not be a good thing, but thank you anyway. Great work

[tushar199]

Thanx... and must say its awesome... Really, the annoying layout of TC now dumped into the gutter for good.. :D

[mrpollo]

Great app man, you deserve heaven, and by heaven i mean endless happiness while you are alive

[kjames]

Ha! I like the new design! That would be great if they made a piratebay and 4chan version!

[chl]

The HN layout is so good and scannable, it almost makes me want to read TechCrunch again.

[manishm]

Its cool..a good demo of how the same content looks readable in different UX , neat!

[Raykhenberg]

Nice solution for all of those people complaining about the redesign.

[johnx123-up]

I'd love Digg theme, SCR

[tcfast]

more on the way.