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Insight

7 Comments and 30 Shares
The great thing is, the sentence is really just a reminder to the listener to worry about whatever aspects of the technology they're already feeling alarmist about, which in their mind gives you credit for addressing their biggest anxieties.
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mistercheese
4212 days ago
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Yes
San Francisco, California
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6 public comments
KieraKujisawa
4210 days ago
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Heh, that comment does work for everything...
Fredericksburg, VA 22408 USA
DivinoAG
4212 days ago
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Comments on this post seem to be completely missing the point. He's not trying to say that we should question all tech, he is saying that to question tech when you don't really have any insights is just a way for people to *appear wise*.
California
bronzehedwick
4212 days ago
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Man that's true.
Tarrytown, NY
Dadster
4212 days ago
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Gee, I don't know. What could possibly go wrong?
New Hampshire
tedder
4212 days ago
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indeed. and kids with their iphones. and self-driving cars. and ABS. and airbags. and flying!
Uranus
rgsunico
4212 days ago
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This SOOO works!

The NewsBlur Redesign

26 Comments and 36 Shares

Not to say that NewsBlur was ugly before today, but it certainly didn’t have the loving embrace of a talented designer. So without waiting another moment (or month) I proudly present the NewsBlur redesign.

image

It’s a full scale redesign, too. And not just one of those redesigns where the icons get glossier and fonts, bolder. Every moving piece of machinery got more than a coat coast of paint. A number of new crucial reading features have been added. Some features were merged, some were repaired, and some were scrapped.

Dashboard before & after:

imageimage

Reading before & after:

imageimage

In no particular order, here’s what’s new:

  • Unified interactions/activities popover. Gets out of your way and gives the dashboard more room to breath.
  • Rewritten feed loader, offering incredible performance, even at the 20x scale of today vs 2 months ago before the Google Reader announcement.
  • Custom vector graphics, retina-fying the entire site.
  • Increased transparency of sites by showing more detail in feed fetching/statistics.
  • A new List view to complement the Split view for stories.

And that’s just for the website. The iOS app, Android app, and blurblogs all got the update goodness that has graced the web app.

image

>The Android app got a nice coat of paint, although there's plenty more to come in the next month. <img src="http://dev.newsblur.com/media/img/welcome/header-android.png" width="307" height="323" style="margin: 0 auto;" alt="image" /> >

As for what’s happening these days, post-Reader:

  • Took some extra time to scale out my backend, now completed.
  • Running on 48 servers, serving 20x traffic
  • Because I had the foresight to charge users for premium service, I’m now confident that NewsBlur will be standing tall a few years from now.
  • Working on the next few big ticket features: saved story search and tagging, batch editing organizer, keyboard shortcut manager, and more.

And if you’re new to NewsBlur, here’s the six core benefits to using the one with the Sun:

  1. Training - hide the stories you don’t like and highlight the stories you do. Make mincemeat out of heavy feeds and make sure to never miss stories from the feeds you love.
  2. Original site - read a publisher’s stories the way they wanted you to read it - on the original website. NewsBlur embeds the publisher’s site in an iframe, and marks what you read as read as you scroll.
  3. Text view - conveniently extracts the story text from articles, necessary for reading truncated rss feeds.
  4. Blurblogs / sharing - a social community where you can share and discuss stories with friends.
  5. Speed - A dedication to fast load times, graphed on your dashboard.
  6. Mobile - native, first-class iOS and Android apps, with all of the functionality of the website.

Now that the redesign has launched, I plan to blog about how to best use the intelligence trainer efficiently, all new [future] features, and how I was able to successfully scale out the four databases (count ‘em: postgresql, mongodb, redis, elasticsearch) to handle more than 10,000 users and 4 million site updates a day. It’s no Tumblr, but it’s still way more traffic than you can fit on a single machine.

Thanks for using NewsBlur and turning my passion project (four years running) into a full-time dream.

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mistercheese
4213 days ago
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Looks good! Good job! I can't wait for the Android update.
San Francisco, California
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22 public comments
oliverzip
4208 days ago
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Still on Google Reader and looking for something better?
Sydney, Balmain, Hornsby.
brokaw
4210 days ago
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I found my Google Reader replacement: NewsBlur
Austin, Texas
stsquad
4210 days ago
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Yay :-)
Cambridge, UK
MatthewMk2
4212 days ago
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The Newsblur redesign is great. No they just need to release a BlackBerry 10 app.
Canada
samuel
4212 days ago
I tried, but the blackberry importer made an APK that crashed on load. Apparently somebody else side loaded it successfully, so YMMV.
MatthewMk2
4212 days ago
I've actually been using the Android app on my Z10 and PlayBook for a few days now. I ran the Android app through this site http://apps.goodereader.com/apk-2-bar/ and it works just fine for me. It'd still be nice to see it officially released, there aren't really any good RSS readers on BB10 right now so I'm sure a lot of people would use it.
Romanikque
4212 days ago
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Worth the fee all over again!
Baltimore, MD
TheRomit
4212 days ago
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So pretty!
santa clara, CA
whereismyjetpack
4212 days ago
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Thank you. I will gladly keep paying for pro now!

Pennsylvania
Michdevilish
4213 days ago
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I like it
Canada
pmanthena
4213 days ago
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Looks great: just please add on the search feature!
marcell
4213 days ago
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"As for what’s happening these days, post-Reader:

Took some extra time to scale out my backend, now completed.
Running on 48 servers, serving 20x traffic
Because I had the foresight to charge users for premium service, I’m now confident that NewsBlur will be standing tall a few years from now.
Working on the next few big ticket features: saved story search and tagging, batch editing organizer, keyboard shortcut manager, and more."
zagreb, croatia
yayadrian
4213 days ago
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I've been using the beta version for a while and really like the new design.
Leicester, UK
habmala
4213 days ago
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Really like the new design.. +1 for keeping up the good work..
Sweden
samuel
4213 days ago
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My favorite part of the NewsBlur redesign are the new blurblogs.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
trekkie
4213 days ago
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Awesome new redesign details for Newsblur
Wake Forest, North Carolina
aaronwe
4213 days ago
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Been using Dev for a while. Love the new layout. Wish this comment box were much, much bigger.
Denver
grammargirl
4212 days ago
Cosign this. Even just another couple lines of height would help. It's super hard to edit comments as-is. I do really like the redesign, though!
tedder
4213 days ago
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cheers!
Uranus
bsag
4213 days ago
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Great-looking redesign of NewsBlur, both on the desktop and iOS. It's easier to find the features, too.
robzienert
4213 days ago
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Love the update.
Minneapolis, MN
diannemharris
4213 days ago
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I like it! I think it is much more readable now, with more focus on the content than the delivery system.
ameel
4213 days ago
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Yay!
Melbourne, Australia
JayM
4213 days ago
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Very nice!
Atlanta, GA
christophersw
4213 days ago
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Love the clean new interface!
Baltimore, MD
Romanikque
4212 days ago
The mobile versions are the bomb.com