A new version of freshnews!
When I created freshnews back in college I never thought I’d still be working on it eleven years later. The idea came out of a legitimate need to aggregate news. There weren’t any news aggregation sites on the internet because RSS (or RDF as it was called back in the day) wasn’t being published by anyone. If you wanted to aggregate a site you had to scrape the HTML, a brittle process for sure. That’s how freshnews got it start. It was a collection of a lot of little, custom scripts that parsed the HTML of all the tech news sites I liked to read each day. The original scripts were written in perl, but were soon converted over to PHP.
Now, eleven years later, internet news has come a long, long way. Aggregating news is now a fairly simple process thanks to RSS and there are a TON of good options to keep up with this news. I half expected freshnews to die a slow death because of these sites, but something amazing happened. People kept coming. I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised since I also continued using the site, but I’m a bit biased for obvious reasons. I think the thing that people continue to like about freshnews is the speed at which they can browse the news. Google Reader is a fantastic product, but I know first-hand that it can eat up large chunks of my time if I let it. freshnews allows you to quickly browse headlines and open the few that look interesting. Tabbed browsing has made this a really smooth process.
There have been a few complete re-writes of the code that runs freshnews.org over the years and today I’m releasing yet another. The goal of this re-write was to polish some existing features and add a few new ones. Also, I wanted a reason to play with rails 3.0. Many of the features were added in response to user requests on http://freshnews.uservoice.com.
User Requests
- Custom Colors
freshnews used to allow the user to pick from a few different themes, but that was removed on a previous re-write of the site. There wasn’t a great reason besides laziness on my part. Well, they’re back. We’re starting with just a few themes to pick from, but I’m very willing to add more based on user requests. I’m not a designer, so feel free to send me mockups if you are looking for something in particular.
- Word Filter
A few people asked for a way to hide news that they didn’t care about. Are you an Andoird user and loathe seeing all the hoopla surrounding a new iPhone release? Well, you’re in luck. You can just add the word “iphone” to your filter and never see another headline with that word in it. Add as many or as few as you like. You can always delete the filter when you realize the iPhone is a far superior device. ;)
- Password recovery
Not an exciting feature, but a handy one at times. There’s now a way to recover/reset your password if you forget it.
Other New Features
- Mobile View
If you’ve ever tried to view freshnews on your mobile phone you’ll know that it was a challenging task. Smashing the normal page down to fit in the mobile browser made everything so small you constantly had to zoom in and out. With the new site, your mobile browsing experience should be much better. Instead of smashing it down to tiny text, we simply stack the news boxes on top of each other. You can see this effect by dragging the size of your desktop browser to be very narrow. We hope this allows you to actually use the site on your mobile phone. I can’t guarantee that it will work on every mobile phone, but if you use a webkit-based browser you should be good.
- More Sign In/Up Options
You can now sign up for or into the site using your twitter or github account. This is handy if you’d rather not remember yet another username/password. Let me know if you’d like to see other options here.
- Improved Feed Re-Ordering
The old site allowed you to re-order feeds on the “Customize” page, but it didn’t do it very well. It stacked them all vertically and would stop working at times if you added a feed from the “Available” column. The new site improves this process quite a bit by actually showing you the feeds in a three column arrangement. Dragging the sites around quickly rearranges the other feeds so you can see exactly how they’ll be arranged on the front page. You can also drag to/from the “Available” column as much as you want.
- Customized Number of Headlines
Previously you could view any number of headlines you wanted from each site as long as that number was ten. Now, you can enjoy many other numbers with this new option in the “Customize” section. Warning, loading 25 headlines from 30 different sites can make for a slow-ish page load.
Changes
- No More Open ID
There’s one feature that I added a few years ago that I thought users would LOVE. This feature was Open ID and it turns out that no one cared. Only a small percentage of users actually ever used this and now it’s going away. Good riddance!
- No More Anonymous Customizations
Guests used to be able to customize the site without logging in. Behind the scenes it was a bit of mess to support as there were a ton of temporary accounts to deal with. I decided that it would be MUCH easier to drop support for this going forward. By adding the 3rd party authentication options, signing up/in should be a very quick and easy process. Please let me know if there are other services you’d like to sign up/in through.
Upcoming Features
I really want to build the site that you, the freshnews community, want to use. There are a few features left on my list that I hope to implement soon. Search is one of these. freshnews used to have a full-text search feature, but that turned out to be a bit wonky and I was forced to take it away until I got time to get it all sorted out. That day will be soon.
Another feature that I plan to implement soon is PubSubHubBub support. It’s a funny name, but really handy. This will allow the page to update in near-realtime for sites that support this protocol.
Finally, I hope to start building a few other topic-specific pages. While the front-page of freshnews will continue to be a nice assortment of tech news, I think it would be nice to have a few other pages dedicated to specific tech topics. I need you to tell me what those should be. A specific programming language? Gaming? Mobile news? Other? I’m interested to hear what you have to say. Leave a comment here or post on the uservoice page.
I hope you enjoy the new site. It’s been a lot of fun to build and I hope you’ll continue to let me know how you like it.
Thanks!
