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.
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.