Samuel Clay is a grad student in the schools of design and of engineering at Harvard. He founded NewsBlur, a personal RSS news reader, and Turn Touch, beautiful control for the smart home.
Talk to him @samuelclay.
Samuel Clay is a grad student in the schools of design and of engineering at Harvard. He founded NewsBlur, a personal RSS news reader, and Turn Touch, beautiful control for the smart home.
Talk to him @samuelclay.
NewsBlur has and, for as far out as I can see, will be a side-project. It’s fun, but I can’t even begin to imagine the headaches I’d face if I had to support a living salary through NewsBlur. My goal is just to meet potential co-founders and to try to make a splash. And I’ve been meeting folks here in NYC who I would not have met otherwise. So it’s working quite well, so far. Fabulously well, in fact.
Raising money for something like this must be difficult and a huge crapshoot. There are a lot of fadish readers out there who have already sucked up most of the goodwill that the press is willing to give to this area, and even then, they have a design element that is extremely hard to compete with. Financial backers would much rather shut a site down than let it live a meager existence. They’re not out to support a site, they want a 10x return. Funding doesn’t make any sense for what I want.
Besides, now I can build fun features like social, the iPhone app, and river of news in peace. Who knows what markets I would have to chase if I had stakeholders. Enterprise! Aggregators! Ick.
I think any other business is a better business to be in, but who knows if my tune will change within the next 12 months, as I roll out bigger features.
Progress is progress, except when it gets in the way of your workflow. Let’s compare these two screenshots:
Notice how much more pleasant the old-style Exposé is? Introduced in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, and virtually unchanged until OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, it featured proportional windows. By just looking at the size of the window relative to the other windows, you can get a fair idea of what the application is.
The proportional windows went out the window with the new Exposé. Now it features an inexplicable grid, with windows resized to all different dimensions relative to their original size.
The great news is that you can get the old-school Exposé back. The beta builds of Snow Leopard included a new Dock.app that used the old-style exposé. By installing the old Dock.app, you get the new Dock features of Snow Leopard, while preserving the legendary Exposé.
#!sh
sudo chown -R root ~/Desktop/Dock.app;
sudo chgrp -R wheel ~/Desktop/Dock.app;
sudo killall Dock && \
sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app ~/Desktop/OldDock.app && \
sudo mv ~/Desktop/Dock.app /System/Library/CoreServices/Easy to do and indispensible now that you have it back. Hat-tip to miknos at MacRumors for the original find.
Note that you will have to repeat this process every time you upgrade your Mac OS to a new patch release (10.6.6 -> 10.6.7).
@samuelclay is on Twitter.
Use Google Reader? I built NewsBlur, a new feed reader with intelligence.
Last week I submitted my project, NewsBlur, a feed reader with intelligence, to Hacker News. This was a big deal for me. For the entire 16 months that I have been working on the project, I was waiting for it to be Hacker News ready. It’s open-source on GitHub, so I also had the extra incentive to do it right.
And last week, after I had launched premium accounts and had just started polishing the classifiers, I felt it was time to show it off. I want to show you what the Hacker News effect has been on both my server and my project.
When I wasn’t writing code on the subway every morning and evening, I would think about what the reaction on Hacker News would be. Would folks find NewsBlur too buggy? Would they be interested at all? Let me tell you, it’s a great motivator to have an audience in mind and to constantly channel them and ask their opinion. Is a big-ticket feature like Google Reader import necessary before it’s Hacker News ready? It would take time, and time was the only currency which I could pay with. In my mind, all I had to do was ask. (“Looks cool, but if there’s no easy way to migrate from Google Reader, this thing is dead in the water.”)
Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” (From Vonnegut’s Introduction to Bagombo Snuff Box.)
Let’s consider Hacker News as that “one person,” since for all intents, it is a single place. I wasn’t working to please every Google Reader user: the die-hards, the once-in-a-seasons, or the twitter-over-rss’ers. For the initial version, I just wanted to please Hacker News. I know this crowd from seeing how they react to any new startup. What’s the unique spin and what’s the good use of technology, they would ask. What could make it better and is it good enough for now?
If you’re outsourcing tech and just applying shiny visuals to your veneer, the Hacker News crowd sniffs it out faster than a beagle in a meat market. So I thought the best way to appeal to this crowd is to actually make decisions about the UI that would confuse a few people, but enormously please many people. From comments on the Hacker News thread, it looks like I didn’t wait too long.
Continue reading What Happened to NewsBlur: A Hacker News Effect Post-Mortem (1507 words)...I recently moved NewsBlur from MySQL to PostgreSQL for a variety of reasons, but most of all I want to use connection pooling and database replication using Slony, and Postgres has a great track record and community. But all of my data was stored in MySQL and there is no super easy way to move from one database backend to another.
Luckily, since I was using the Django ORM, and with Django 1.2’s multi-db support, I can use Django’s serializers to move the data from MySQL’s format into JSON and then back into Postgres.
Unfortunately, If I were to use the command line, every single row of my models has to be loaded into memory. Issuing commands like this:
python manage.py dumpdata --natural --indent=4 feeds > feeds.jsonwould take a long, long time, and it wouldn’t even work since I don’t have even close to enough memory to make that work.
Luckily, the dumpdata and loaddata management commands are actually just wrappers on the internal serializers in Django. I decided to iterate through my models and grab 500 rows at a time, serialize them and then immediately de-serialize them (so Django could move from database to database without complaining).
import sys
from django.core import serializers
def migrate(model, size=500, start=0):
count = model.objects.using('mysql').count()
print "%s objects in model %s" % (count, model)
for i in range(start, count, size):
print i,
sys.stdout.flush()
original_data = model.objects.using('mysql').all()[i:i+size]
original_data_json = serializers.serialize("json", original_data)
new_data = serializers.deserialize("json", original_data_json,
using='default')
for n in new_data:
n.save(using='default')
migrate(Feed)
It’s always nice to see that after working on a project for 13 months, people are finally starting to use it. The source behind NewsBlur is available on GitHub: http://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/. And recently, in response to a Hacker News thread about why RSS readers sucks, I linked to NewsBlur and explained my rationale:
I think I created a very nice feed reading experience with NewsBlur: http://www.newsblur.com.
It shows the original site, allows you to read as you normally would, but keeps track of the stories you're scrolling past.
It also allows you to filter stories based on what you like and dislike about them: words/phrases in the title, tags and categories, authors, and the publisher themselves. There is a slider that allows you to show/hide stories based on this filter. It's very fast, too.
I am writing an iPhone app so you can use NewsBlur everywhere. It's just a hobby project, and people have so far been impressed. But I would love for NewsBlur to become a useful tool that people choose to use.
I wrote it because I was also dissatisfied with readers, especially Google Reader. I also knew Python (Django!), JavaScript, and wanted to put them together to test my abilities. </blockquote>
Currently, I am writing the iPhone app that will allow NewsBlur to be useful to a significant portion of Internet users who read RSS. Everybody that I have talked to says they are waiting for a good mobile version before they sink in time and curation into NewsBlur. Let's hope I am not underestimating when I say 1-2 months.