Readrz Blog

Suspending Readrz Services
Apr 4, 2015

I am suspending all services behind the Readrz.com infrastructure today:

Feeds scanning service
Duplicate finder service
Search indexer service
Image scanner service
Summarizer service
Mongo database
Web site

All the code (apart from AWS connection details) is released here: akuz/readrz-public

There is a high chance that I can bring the infrastructure up again, if there is interest. Hopefully, one day I can also release the exciting innovative JavaScript menus as standalone components. I am keeping the database of all the news scanned between Jan, 2011 - Mar, 2015.

For now, I’ve decided to redirect $150 it costs to run it monthly to another project.

Good Bye Screenshots

Here are a few screenshots I’ve taken just to remember how it looked like at the last iteration.

Front page (celebrating the Iran deal at the top news item):

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New User Interface Mock Up
Nov 10, 2013

I think this is my best GUI prototype so far. It can actually achieve the original goal of “going deeper into the data”. It also highlights the history of what user selected to get the final data to look at. I think it makes it easy to go back one step back.

Drawbacks:

Categorization is not shown by default
The need to zoom out after you select some category, if you want to select a “sister” category
- For example, I select “Countries”, and then instead I want to select companies
- I would have to “zoom out” of countries, and then select “Companies” – two clicks!
- This problem could be solved by replacing circle with tabs
- However, this would introduce another problem
  - User would need to click twice to go into Countries/Europe
  - Instead of just zooming in using the same circle…

All – Magazine

Default front page
Showing “All” in “Magazine” mode
User can select different ways to look at data (tabs)

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Hacker News Post
Nov 8, 2013

Recently, I posted a link to Readrz to Hacker News. It was on the front page for about 10-20 minutes. Around 600 people came during that time. Got some feedback, and here is the summary:

The time of posting to HN is important (when I posted the link, most of the US was still asleep)
Dynamics: Day 1 – 600 visits, Day 2 – 100 visits, Day 3 – 50 visits, Day 4 – 20 visits
Important to get the users into the loop – I didn’t have forms to sign up or share buttons
Therefore, I lost all the users that came on that day – although, I could have kept them
User interface:
- It was not good enough, otherwise it would stay longer on the front page
- Some people really liked the circle section selector
- One person said it’s hard to look through it – agree
- But the circle has obvious benefit of showing two levels – something in exchange
- The second circle really confuses people what it’s all about…