Text only news websites (2022)(blog.wturrell.co.uk) |
Text only news websites (2022)(blog.wturrell.co.uk) |
.. and already dated wrt Thomson Reuters Foundation Trust link ( news.trust.org ) which is now archived and replaced by
- He sees no point in adding another layer of abstraction and complexity to something simple.
- he's into retro computing, and old machines can't handle NNW.
- Fewer and fewer web sites support RSS, so using NNW limits his options.
- Sometimes you want to read the news from a particular web site, and not graze at a buffet.
irc.libera.chat has
##hntop - updated as hacker news item cream rises to the top
##news - common interest international stuff
##alerts - earthquakes, electricity, ...
We have two issues: there are fewer and fewer sources of RSS; and those that do exist frequently use meaningless titles like "Look at this!".
I can't really blame the news channels, they don't get any revenue from these streams.
On desktop, I'll nuke any interstitial element (including "related stories" and the like) on sites. The calming factor between post- and pre-edited sites is ... somewhat nuts. One of my faves was old-school Buzzfeed, where I nuked anything but the actual headline and feature story, which I'd called "Unbuzzed".
(And yes, "Buzzfeed" itself is mostly trash, "Buzzfeed News" was/is actually somewhat respectable. I generally didn't seek out the sites, but occasionally clicked through on links from elswewhere.)
According to the people complaining on HN, yes. It's been a common topic of conversation on this web site for the last five years or so.
No RSS here: https://www.rfi.fr
The New York Times does RSS, but among major news organizations, it is one of the exceptions.
All blog frameworks have support by default...
Good for blogs.
Equally, why not just use one of the many FOSS tools to scrape sites that don't offer RSS feeds and DIY your own? This is a long-solved problem; RSS remains wonderful.
It will be more and more difficult to make a Google/DDG/Kagi search and spot the autogenerated crap. So maybe it will be time to manually select blogs/websites we like and trust. And RSS is amazing for that.
Still one of my favourite things to emerge on the net. Especially being able to filter through feeds!
I much prefer that format over news sites on the web: Headlines are often laid out in a list one entry below the other, which is easy to read through without having to scroll. Because pages are limited to 40 columns × 24 rows, every article is short and to the point.
I don't usually read it on TV though but on a web-site [2] which has transformed page numbers into hyperlinks, and given multi-pages a tab-like interface. There are still no images, no ads ... and especially no auto-playing videos. Perfect!
Recently though, I've spent a lot of time in a hospital bed and it has been easier for me then to use the TV remote with one hand to check teletext than to use the tablet or smartphone.
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext>
[2] <https://texttv.nu/> (Swedish SVT Text)
Pretty close to our different Teletext services.
Edit, thank you for the feedback. Some clarifications:
- we launched the news feature literally yesterday, it is MVP level so expect inaccuracies especially in the summaries. We are using our own models and are in the process of tuning and refining them. Clicking on the cluster will give you the actual headline, titles and sources for each cluster.
- the ordering of the feed is super simple right now. We will improve the weighting based on recency, magnitude of the story, coverage, parties involved etc.
- This is not text-only like text.npr.org but in the sense of not being stuffed with ads, autoplay videos and images. Both a real text-only statically rendered page and RSS feed are in the works.
The site is focussed on financial data, charts and realtime updates. This is why it is javascript heavy despite visually simple.
I like the interface - compact and fast.
We are planning to launch an API (rss style) for the news next week where you can get temporal clusters and everything. Imagine having full access to all of Twitter trending but across all news sources.
We are trying to filter clickbait, SEO spam as effectively as possible while keeping nuance to the dataset.
Please sign up for an account or follow us on twitter if you would like to stay in the loop.
The summaries for several headlines are completely bogus, which undermines any credibility that this was a reliable site. For example, the Lufthansa Strike blames a technical issue, not the strike that all linked articles discuss. Next, the Khazahstan election summary mentions voters in Turkey and Turkmenistan. There’s also duplicated stories, and other obvious issues any human editor would catch.
I suspect this is secretly powered by some AI that doesn’t actually work all that well.
Since you get the actual news headlines and teaser on the detail, we assume some inaccuracies are ok for now. The primary focus right now is clustering and a high-level overview over the news landscape. Especially to get perspectives about an event from many different sources.
We are iterating quickly and expect this to somewhat stable and reliable by mid April.
Would appreciate if you had a look back again then to share your feedback.
Ah. That explains why in Lynx all I see is a dozen instances of:
Loading
This is also still loading.
This will be loaded shortly.Interesting claim considering there are 276 image tags in the HTML: https://imgur.com/a/x9ODk0r
If the latter, isn't that illegal or against their terms of service in some way?
So if you're looking for a sports alternative, https://plaintextsports.com (which I made) works great! All the scores, play-by-play, box scores, standings, and schedules, but just no news stories. Blazing fast.
(No, it's not technically "Content-Type: text/plain", it uses HTML and CSS. Yes, I know it's not necessarily easier to read; it's an aesthetic. Yes, this is shameless self-promotion.)
Lots of great sources in the link below. I already had my own list of the usual players but this link covers many more I didn't know existed:
https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/
The only site that I rarely see mentioned (or included in the link above) is : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/textbased/channel-561/index.html
So I build NewsWaffle, which for any website:
https://github.com/acidus99/NewsWaffle
* Automatically builds a list of news stores, separate from the navigational hyperlinks.
* Detects RSS/Atom feeds to provide a more accurate list of news stories.
* Uses Readability to show only article content on article pages.
* Uses meta data like OpenGraph or Twitter cards to provide richer formatting, and to determine page type.
It regularly converts 900 KB home pages or 1.2 MB news articles into into 3KB for links to news stories and 5K of text
It does this by:
* Using semantic tags like <header>, <footer>, and <nav> to determines which hyperlinks are navigational and which ones are likely links to news articles.
* OpenGraph meta data to determine page type news stories and extra metadata.
* A Aggressive HTML parser that strips out a ton of tags, CSS, JS, etc
* Readability library to extract out the text of news articles
I built this as a service in Gemini, so if you have a gemini browser you can try it. Otherwise, here is a HTTP-to-gemini proxy showing you what a NYT article looks like:
Gemini link: gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/
NYT Homepage: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/li...
NYT Article: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/ar...
> mbasic.facebook.com
> Ideal if you’re the kind of person who just quickly needs to check the feed and go away again. There’s no javascript so it feels (and definitely is) faster and less bloated. The design is nicely old fashioned.
I've been using this site for years but it's increasingly bit rotting and regularly serves broken links.
Nook still has a newstand store (for now?) but I haven't used it so can't comment on the formatting and UX.
I also use teddit.net which is essentially a plaintext reddit https://teddit.net/r/worldnews
cp /etc/lynx.cfg $HOME/.lynx.cfg
export LYNX_CFG=$HOME/.lynx.cfg
VIEWER:application/postscript:fbgs %s VIEWER:image/gif:sxiv -a %s VIEWER:image/x-xbm:sxiv -a %s VIEWER:image/png:sxiv -a %s VIEWER:image/tiff:sxiv -a %s VIEWER:image/jpeg:sxiv -a %s VIEWER:video/mpeg:mpv %s VIEWER:video/mp4:mpv %s
Install sxiv and mpv, of course.
There's a GitHub repository floating around somewhere with code for an rss feed of it which works great for getting it on mobile.
When reading programming tutorials or a write up about a tech concept do you prefer if the article has a hero image or not? This would be an image loaded at the top which sums up the title of the post visually.
On a related note, personally if someone has 500 blog posts I'd like to see them in a condensed bullet list so I can scan the titles super fast. I don't want to see images and have 10 loaded per page. It turns something from a 2 minute effortless quick scan to dozens of clicks and potentially 20 minutes.
However, in practice having images for each post seems to get more engagement (ie. people clicking things and beginning to read your article). I never understood why in the context of programming. I understand pictures are useful for hardware or if you need to make a diagram. I'm mainly talking about the hero image here.
I hate fluff. I can spot it a mile away. If you have a hero image that adds no value then don't use it. If it has a related screenshot with interesting or useful information in it (like a code snippet and resulting output that the tutorial covers), that might be useful.
Otherwise just... don't.
Doesn't work on all articles: https://txtify.it
Btw, Igor Chubin is the author of great CLI services such as: cheat.sh[1], late.nz[2], QRenco.de[3],rate.sx[4]
[0] https://github.com/chubin/awesome-console-services
[1] https://github.com/chubin/cheat.sh
[2] https://github.com/chubin/late.nz
- gopher://magical.fish
- gopher://gopherddit.com
- gopher://mozz.us
- gopher://gophernews.netI tested aldaily.com and had trouble navigating to get to the articles. Allsides.com worked. Techmeme.com did not work.
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/links?https%3A%2F%2Fallsides.com%2F
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/li...
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/raw?https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aldaily.com%2F
Clicking on the "more" links which take you to the news articles also works properly as well.
(you can get to raw mode by clicking "Force article view" and then "raw mode." I should probably expose that in other places)
NewsWaffle tries to determine the type of page. Articles get displayed with content run through readability, and then the HTML is stripped down. If its a "links" page, like the home or section page on a news site, it using HTML elements to try and find links to news stories vs navigational links to other parts of the site. Part of that is looking for links with longer text, since link text to news stories tend to be a few words. This helps sort "About Us" from "New Fusion Experiment a Success"). I'll check into why aldaily isn't working properly
Sorry I can't seem to reproduce the Techmeme issue. It works for me:
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/view?https%3A%2F%2Fwww.techmeme.com
Any suggestions?
A request: In the linked NY Times front page, more formatting for the article list, maybe blank lines between articles. Visually, it's a challenge.
For a GUI, I use Lagrange: https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
Lagrange is sort of the Netscape of Gemini. It works on all the major desktop and mobile OSes. Personally prefer Elaho (iOS) or Buran (Android) for mobile
I wish 99% of sites gave a damn about these things. Well, I approve, and good luck!
In this particular case, I think halotrope just didn't think the dislosure was necessary. They have a link to the website in their profile and aren't trying to hide the affiliation.
Full disclosure: I'm not related to halotrope in any way nor to the website in question.
Please change the slide out on the left to be visible permanently.
I have 1920 pixels of horizontal screen real estate, and the page is quite literally half empty whitespace anyway. For what conceivable reason is that menu on the left a hidden-by-default slide out? It even hides pertinent stock information.
Also concerning the stock information, please add some whitespace margin on the bottom. Chrome displays URL information on the bottom left of the window when hovering links and it overlaps and obstructs visibility of whatever stock ends up displayed at the bottom left of the window.
The sparklines and better charts are being worked on. We hope to get a new version out early April, right now focussing on the API and Chat functionality.
It would be nice if your interface sorted the sources by bias and let you side between different summaries. In the upper right corner of Modo you can swap between timeline view (seeing past incarnations of a story as it progresses, or lean view that let’s you see various bias.)