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.<p>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...
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.<p>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.
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.)<p>Compare this bookmarklet: <a href="https://www.masswerk.at/bookmarklets/netscapify/" rel="nofollow">https://www.masswerk.at/bookmarklets/netscapify/</a>
You can experience this on an (emulated) 68k Mac in your browser using Oldweb.Today: <a href="https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#http://68k.news/" rel="nofollow">https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#http://68k.news/</a>
My favorite part by far is when you click on a link you see just the plain text of the article sans distractions.<p>Edit: also it shows a few key news articles with related articles. This means I'm not infinitely scrolling which is nice.
I'm curious where the data get fetched from. The Author mentions that Mozilla Readability and SimplePie are used.<p>Readability to parse the content. SimplePie to fetch the data (I assume). Dat from RSS feeds?<p>In case you want to make something similar, I recently wrote a blog on where you could get news data for free [1]<p>(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.<p>[1] <a href="https://blog.newscatcherapi.com/an-ultimate-list-of-open-sourced-free-tools-to-collect-parse-online-news-articles/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.newscatcherapi.com/an-ultimate-list-of-open-sou...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/kotartemiy/pygooglenews" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kotartemiy/pygooglenews</a><p>[3] <a href="https://newscatcherapi.com/free-news-api" rel="nofollow">https://newscatcherapi.com/free-news-api</a>
Interview with the founder on the Register[0]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/29/google_news_netscape_port/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/29/google_news_netscape_...</a>
This is similar to a site that I built!
<a href="http://feather.news" rel="nofollow">http://feather.news</a><p>Best viewed on mobile and you can optionally use a version without images by clicking the link at the top right of the page.
I know I'm the only one who's reading news on the Kindle Voyage, but I'm definitely adding this to my bookmarks list on the e-reader. Super cool!
This is beautiful. Everything should have a text mode like this.<p>I should make it an option for my own site, and I will! Thank you for the inspiration.
Where is the feed this is based upon from?<p>Google news rss seems to be different and is full with amp links:<p><a href="https://news.google.com/rss?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en" rel="nofollow">https://news.google.com/rss?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en</a>
I didn't know the <small> tag was that old! Also thought a page from back then would be ascii instead of utf8.<p>(Also, I thought every page from that era was required to have at least one <blink> tag, and possibly an "Under Construction" image.)
I assembled a similar decruftifier for the <i>Washington Post</i> specifically, using html-xml-utils (<a href="https://www.w3.org/Tools/HTML-XML-utils" rel="nofollow">https://www.w3.org/Tools/HTML-XML-utils</a> -- and some sed/awk) to strip only core article content & metadata (head, byline, dateline). Result was typically <5% of original HTML.<p>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.
I know this is supposed to be retro but I use NPR text mode always. No pics, just text, its glorious.<p><a href="https://text.npr.org/" rel="nofollow">https://text.npr.org/</a><p>Far easier to read since the length of the line is absolutely perfect. Pro tip: <a href="https://practicaltypography.com/line-length.html" rel="nofollow">https://practicaltypography.com/line-length.html</a><p>That said - something is wrong with NPR, a bunch of Lorem Ipsum links :)
Viewing the source of that webpage really takes you back. Plain old HTML. It's nostalgic beauty.<p>I recently fixed up an old 486 I purchased off eBay but it was bittersweet when I managed to get it connected to the 'net. Most websites were inaccessible due to the lack of support for today's encryption protocols, those that were had numerous JavaScript issues.
This is great! I so don't miss the err, personalization and targeted content. If you can track down RSS news sources I'd recommend having a look at Newsbeuter <a href="https://github.com/akrennmair/newsbeuter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/akrennmair/newsbeuter</a>
Neat project. I use NetNewsWire for rss. It’s interesting that the format people prefer to consume news in versus the format that news is delivered in are now so different.<p>Newspapers went through the same thing. The older papers are all stories and were funded through the price of the paper, then ads invaded the margins.
I did not know that google news is not available in Spain
<a href="https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9609687?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9609...</a>
This is perfect! I have news.google.com blocked on my PC because I'm trying to block a bad habit of idly typing it in and getting sucked into the void. Came to HN and still found a way to get the news drip without as much distraction. :)
Needs a very light gray background.<p>To be devil's advocate, I feel like those serif fonts were easier to read on a low resolution monitor because they were sharper due to the pixels being very apparent.<p>Here not even on a 4K, I find it difficult to read the headlines.
It would be great to get this working on each of our personalized Google News feed. But I suspect it would require either a userscript stylesheet or Google sign-in (if that even gives you a personalized feed).
Subjective, but I wonder if browsers had defaulted to sans serif font instead of serif, people wouldn't complain about "how bad this webpage looks". I get the document origins of course.
This is wonderful! As pages get more bloated and new crypto is used for https my old computers lose access to more and more of the web, bookmarking this to browse from mac os 9 later on today.
This is great! And retro, your channel seems cool. I think I have a 3com Audrey Ergo in the closet if my wife didn't toss it. It you're interested I'll send it to you.
Considering the content, maybe it should be renamed "Google Trivia". It's like a bad version of Reddit with no comments for context/addl information.