Scripting News: A prototype for a feed reader

Friday December 9, 2022; 4:15 PM EST

Rather than just preaching how feed readers could easily accommodate both titled and title-less items, as I have been, I put up a prototype that illustrates, with real data. It's not a lot of work, I developed this from scratch in one full programming day. Still have a little work tomorrow. #
Here's how it deals with three test feeds. #

NYT feed. It's an easy case because the NYT feeds are uniform. #
Scripting News feed contains both titled and title-less posts.#
My Mastodon feed, where all items are title-less. #

I will publish the source tomorrow, and hopefully skilled UI designers will have a look and then maybe we can approach the developers at each of the feed reader developers, and get past this. #

Last update: Saturday December 10, 2022; 12:20 PM EST.

You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)