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• R RSS - Really Simple Syndication RSS - Really Simple Syndication remote 6 hours ago You are here

  Adapted my RSS reader for a client and bringing those learnings back to my app

  I have built and maintained newsfeedreader.com for at least ten years that I can remember. I recently added native mobile apps for it thanks to our LLM "friends" and that got noticed by a client who needed this type of functionality for a niche audience.

  I built a separate app for them using the same type of infrastructure and iterated with them based on user feedback. The new app has been growing nicely for the client thanks to their marketing efforts and budget. So I wanted to bring back some of the improvements to my original version too.

  The easiest way to explain those improvements is to list out what i had vs what I've added based on user feedback.

  • Combine news sources into one feed (yawn, yes i know this is why we all build these apps). Through user feedback I was able to enhance the user experience to get a pretty well received news discovery experience. You set how many news sources to combine and then click "Random" to show that number of news sources in one combined feed. Combined random feeds can be narrowed down by category or manually selected. Its also able to detect and show related articles so users dont get repetitive articles in their feed. I also added a way to search across all cached articles that can lead to users finding sources they dont have in their current "mix" of news sources
  • Easier to undertstand UI on web and mobile. With all the options I've got in my feed reader and ways to customize the experience, features were not being used as much. Through different experiments about what worked best, I got to what has proven to be a better way to communicate those features to users and to get them to use them.
  • Improved onboarding: The previous versions gave users "Starter feeds" and they could add or remove other sources as needed from a global library. That was too much work for users. The current app adds all sources for new users and over time users can choose to not see a source in their mix.

  There are numerous backend improvements to caching, background tasks and a whole lot more that make the app faster to load and more reliable.

  I've also been able to reuse the backend for multiple purposes for other clients. See texasmoneytrail.org, ohiomoneytrail.org and several other [state]moneytrail.org sites for battleground states. They show election data on money spent in elections from a non profit site and also news articles relevant to each election race (these come from newsfeedreader's backend)

  Wanted to get feedback from users on the current versions of Web, Android and iOS. If you try it out, what problems does it still not solve? Is it something that could be a daily driver for you? It has been my go to of course but would be good to see what others think (especially other rss app creators) that it's lacking

  submitted by /u/jdoeq
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