Show HN: My all-nighter project to find the best Google Reader alternative (opens in new tab)

This is exactly what I want. I know what I want to read, I don't need some algorithm telling me what I might like.

All my feeds are carefully chosen based on site reputation, article quality, journalism quality and my of course my interests. When I want a little bit of everything, I just browse HN (often from Reader).

I've never used Google Reader for just these very reasons, and have been using Thunderbird for several years, even though Thunderbird is hardly ideal. The disadvantages of existing web-based readers really outweigh the one feature that's really superior in web-based clients, that being ubiquitous synchronization.

What I'd love to see in a reader:

* Email-like interface

* Custom folder hierarchy, allowing filtering of specific feeds into specific folders.

* A "unified inbox" that shows new items from all feeds, outside the normal folder hierarchy.

* Highly customizable text themes, allowing font, size, and color defaults to be easily configured without having to write custom CSS.

* Automatic retrieval of the full article for RSS items that don't include full text, parsed through a readable/readability-like filter, conforming to the user's defined text theme.

* Automatic retrieval of the comments feed for each article, to be displayed in a separate pane or tab.

* Integrated streaming of audio and video for podcast feeds, with playback positions remembered from session to session.

* No feed recommendations, no integrated "feed gallery", no integration with any external sites - especially Facebook; at most, "share link" buttons for individual sites that can be customized and disabled individually by the user (so, e.g., I could optionally add a button to my UI for posting the artice to HN or reddit).

I'd be willing to pay for a client that had this featureset.

No, that's exactly what I want. Luckily, I'm building exactly that, but it's gonna cost you money[1].

Reason being is that RSS is 'dead'. I will never be able to attract funding for what I'm building, and to be able to maintain, extend, update and generally give it the love it'll need, it will need to support me, at least part time.

If you're interested in learning more about what I'm up to, I have a Launchrock page up at http://signup.viafeeds.com. The iOS screenshot was taken from my phone. The software is real, and very intentionally minimal.

I was expecting to have at least another few months of dev time before Google Reader shut down. The announcement yesterday caught me by surprise, and I tossed up the signup page as a response. Wish I'd had more time...

[1] A nominal amount to be sure, along the lines of that proverbial Starbucks beverage per month, but it definitely won't be free.

You are not alone. I'm also insta turned off by any reader replacement that wants access to my google account. Seriously, I'm supposed to give you access to my friggin contacts just to try your service?! I just want to read my feeds and sync across devices.

The differentiating feature of Reader for me was that I could have extremely good discussions around various items with a circle of friends and friends-of-friends. I'm not as interested in algorithmically-suggested items, but if somebody whose taste I appreciate has something to say about an item I'd like to be able to discuss that. And that small circle of people has a larger signal-to-noise ratio for me than HN or Reddit comments.

So I think the appeal of a minimal social component in an RSS reader is not adding to the already-unmanageable deluge of information, but to add richness and depth to the existing pool.

This is what I want too, and that's why I'm gonna take a stab at building my own. I don't really want to share an article about spoon carving, but hot damn do I want to read it.

If you solve this problem can you please reply to your comment with the solution. Thanks.

FeedDemon does exactly what you mention. I've used it for a long time and tried many alternatives. FD just does what you ask it to and nothing more. It's a shame that, when Google Reader shut down, Nick decided to kill it.

If you find that, let us know. Many of us feel very much the same way (which is why I loved the old greader. new reader ain't as good, but still got the job done... sort of)

Agreed. I'm thinking of paying for Fever just so I can get an reader but haven't heard of many people using it before.

I want that, and I want it in oldest-first order. So many of the alternatives I've tried only offer newest first!

exactly.

- Use a client that supports RSS.

- Sync your data with Dropbox and use it on other machines.

Or

FeedHQ.org (Open Source) looks like a fine alternative but I am not sure what it supports yet in terms of your needs. Like they do have list, unread counts, tags(categories). Well, they have support read it later(which you said you don't want, maybe - but it's not that social :P)

Hell, even I do not want a social service or another GR or maybe not another free service that will go kaput anyday.

I guess FeedHQ guys have a real chance here with NewsBlur too cluttered and too slow.

Try http://rssident.com

I built it for many of the reasons you stated. I also wanted to be able to do specific kinds of search (All craigslist telecommute Java jobs in the US -- http://rssident.com/mash/?t=job&e=telecommute).

It still needs a lot of work but I plan to keep it relatively simple and useful.

Absolutely 100% spot on. Amen!

Indeed, this is actually our eventual goal. The idea was to get something out, aggregate the most exhaustive list of RSS readers and then add the comparison details. It takes time!

I was expecting a feature comparison as well. Does anyone know where one is available?

There are a lot of overlapping features to consider depending on individual usage. Features like tagging, cross platform and mobile, social, scaleability, web/self hosted, price will all be a important factors for most trying to make a decision.

Switching an RSS reader isn't (or shouldn't be) particularly onerous, so there's really no reason to avoid switching even if a new one comes later.

Also, the Chrome extension is taking some liberties to "personalize suggestions": https://getsatisfaction.com/feedly/topics/chrome_app_permiss...

But it's certainly a format which can be expanded upon and applied to the recommending of any number of things.

We are most likely going to be adding this. It was in the original plan, but we wanted to get something out first.

Agreed; ideally a comparison against all of greaders existing features to make it easier so that you could select which greader features you're using and get a list of relevant matching options.

Thank you! I threw together the backbone action under the hood, all credit goes to Alain for the awesome design. We're pretty sure this post would have about 3 upvotes had it not been for the bobbing ship.

Some sites more aggressively got their users to tweet the required hashtags than others.

They have an "in-browser" client, but I think you may have to install the correct extension for it to work. Check out www.feedly.com.

Alright, fixed it!

We're using Ruby, Sinatra, HTTParty, Twitter Search API, Postgres, and Unicorn on a Heroku instance. Basically requesting the page pulls recent tweets from twitter matching the search '#replacereader', those tweets are checked against the DB to prevent dupe counting or multiple votes from one account, and new votes are added accordingly. Vote counts along with our list of replacements are pulled from the database and passed to a haml view, and unicorn caches page requests (including DB lookups and Twitter lookups) for 60 seconds to prevent exceeding APIs or Heroku's Postgres database limits.

The results it pulls together aren't stellar, and the DRM (if you could call it that) makes me ridiculously uncomfortable too.

Sorry, lots of traffic. If you refresh a couple times, it usually comes back :)