It’s very interesting from a psychological standpoint: the current front page headline (for me?) is “Planets and dwarf planets to scale in size, rotation speed, axial tilt and oblateness (numbered in distance order from Sun)”<p>If I were reading this on /r/dataisbeautiful, I’d immediately parse and grok the headline just fine. But with this, my mindset was on the reporting of actions or events and I read “to scale” as an infinitive (verb/action), almost like the intro to a sci-fi novel that starts with a stunning declaration that in x days, all planets will actively shrink by y% in some never before seen cosmic event.<p>If you’ll allow me to use a programming analog, it wasn’t until my tokenizer hit the first parenthesis that my lexer switched to the correct track.
It hangs on "reading stories".<p>Web app authors can be very creative, but one thing I don't like about web apps is that often their error handling is nonexistent. It's not about individual authors; behemots like Microsoft also do this in an irritating way: "Something did not work. Reload the page please" -- Is this really the best a billion dollar company can do? Well, I suppose this is still better than no error at all, which is a default error handling method for big chunk of web apps.<p>I think (but can be wrong) that by using such a dynamic environment like JS is the culprit for lack of good error checking mechanism.<p>Also one thought of mine for the reason why even big companies are unwilling to provide good error messages is that it's impossible to get the real reason. There may be so many moving parts that even the developer isn't able to handle it all. Which sparks a doubt in my mind if this environment is really fit enough to provide high quality software. Since it's so popular it's obvious that it has some aspects that it does right, but it seems that the web app environment could benefit from some fundamental changes.
I went back reading a printed newspaper a few months back and the speed in which I get my news now is astonishing. It feels like the web is not made to update oneself on news efficiently. To skim and zoom in and out of articles. I think part is the display format, part is the organization. A physical newspaper has a very predictable structure and does not change while you are reading it. (I.e. no need to come back to the same section once you read it).<p>Typography and layouting of a newspaper is quite complex. If you look at a printed newspaper, the stories are arranged and cut to size with images, captions and inserts to fit neatly into the grid.<p>Depending on the newspaper the information flow from headline, subheadings, article is strict, optimizing for allowing for fast skimreading or to grab your attention.<p>To do this "right" on challenging unedited reddit posts will be a lot of work, but an interesting challenge.
The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at <a href="https://api.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/hot?limit=25" rel="nofollow">https://api.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/hot?limit=25</a>. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed).<p>The resource at “<a href="https://api.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/hot?limit=25”" rel="nofollow">https://api.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/hot?limit=25”</a> was blocked because content blocking is enabled.<p>ReferenceError: error is not defined<p>MacOS, Firefox 77.0.1
Cool! Another suggestion: why not extract and show the text of the leading comment (or maybe some other metric) of the articles in question rather than lorem ipsum filler?<p>And an option to "turn the page" for more content from the select subreddit would be even cooler!
A note to those using Firefox who get stuck at "Loading stories...": Enhanced Tracking Protection (on by default?) blocks the request. To disable it for this page, click the little purple shield next to the URL.
The hyphenation on the center-spread column doesn't look great, leaving big whitespace gaps in justified text.<p>In my experience, "hyphens: auto" in browsers doesn't work well at widths smaller than 80ch. The "center-spread" column is currently set to width: 600px, approximately 67ch. Changing it to width: 80ch looks much, much better, in my opinion.<p>I also suggest adding the Safari variant, "-webkit-hyphens: auto", and add the lang="en" attribute to your <html> tag, to enable hyphenation in Firefox.
My first reaction to this was, "why?" The skeuomorphism of the low-res paper background and ugly type is horrible. But, reading the comments here, apparently some people like it, so ok.<p>But you can see all the CORS issues this is throwing up. Rather than a 100% js app, why not call a function which fetches the content and caches it too? CORS issues begone, and caches too! You don't need an expensive server setup, have a look at AWS Lambda or Azure Functions.
Would be cool if there was one of these for the front page of HN. Pretty challenging to parse though. Headlines and comments should be simple enough, articles and images not so much.
Please do not use justified formatting for text unless you can hyphenate it. Otherwise you end up with large chunks of white space between the words, especially in narrower (then 6070 characters) columns.<p>Browsers don’t hyphenate, so avoid justified text on the web.
This is amazing! Like the newspapers in harry potter. You’ve closed the loop on automating a dynamic, crowdsourced, curated front page. The meta paper.<p>Now do hackers news. It’ll be like the WSJ, a nice counterpart to this, which is a little more like US Weekly.
Very cool idea, since this is a niche product why not adding a small qr code for the articles? By this way this could totally be printable. You read articles from paper while commuting etc. Mark the ones you find interesting. At the end of the day you could visit them via you phone if you really want to see them live.
Very cool -- looks like the dev (@thesephist) is using Torus, a minimalist front-end framework they themselves are also developing:<p><a href="https://github.com/thesephist/torus" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/thesephist/torus</a><p>Nice showcase of the tech! Now I want to tinker with the Torus framework as well.
A long time ago, when I was more of a news junky, I wrote some scripts to pull from various RSS feeds (BBC, Financial Times, Jane's, and one or two others), crack out the text of recent items, and format into a five-column, landscape-oriented PDF, with nice headlines, table of contents, etc. A cron job would see to running the pipeline every morning and emailing the result to me. When I got to work, I would print it out and read it on breaks throughout the day, crossing off items once I read them or decided they weren't relevant. With a red pen, I could also mark it up and make small notes on interesting items.<p>Curl, BeautifulSoup, and Latex. Great fun.
The best thing about old fashioned newspapers is how much information you can fit on the page. I would consider smaller fonts.
<a href="https://imgur.com/a/Ys1EyAf" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/Ys1EyAf</a>
My print newspaper doesn't say "Loading stories"...<p>How about doing the page generation on the server-side? That way a static page could be served.<p>... actually, in that case, maybe a _PDF_ could be served, and that's really more like print :-)
Imagine that combined with this:
<a href="https://onezero.medium.com/the-morning-paper-revisited-35b407822494" rel="nofollow">https://onezero.medium.com/the-morning-paper-revisited-35b40...</a>
I love this. There’s a weird bug though when you try to zoom in on mobile safari. It jumps back out again and makes it hard to read the smaller articles. Fantastic idea and execution though. Nice.
This doesn't work with Enhanced Tracking Protection and/or uBlock Origin enabled in Firefox. I wonder if there's a way around that server-side.
Several years ago there was an extremely popular app that was an RSS newsfeed aggregator for iPads with an unfortunately very generic name called "the magazine" that did this exact same thing, it embedded the articles in a newspaper aesthetic. Great stuff.<p>I used it extensively on an iPad first generation but unfortunately it's no longer available on the App Store.
How is this related to <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669650" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669650</a> ?
This does some fascinating things to my brain and I think I want a Reddit front end that lets me put in my username to see my own front page as an auto-generated Newspaper.
This is really cool! As a suggestion, you may want to add in a toggle for zoom. On my computer the site looks perfect at 67%.<p>But this is really great work! Great idea and really cool! Good work!<p>Regards,
Peter @ Oeck.
I really like the feel of reading textual posts here, if there was an option to actually read whole posts I'd be sold.<p>P.S. I think special characters need to be unescaped (&gt; → &)
People built things like this 10+ years ago and they were awful, and ridiculed by people in places like HN etc.<p>This format looks good on paper, but on screens its a mess and poorly formatted one at that.<p>Can we stop re-inventing bad UX all over again?