Retin.us - A new way to consume RSS - Zolmeister

http://Retin.us (chrome extension) (source)

Retin.us is not a Google Reader clone. Retin.us doesn't star or share articles. Retin.us doesn't like things, nor does it show you pretty pictures in a collage.

Retin.us does one thing, and it does it well. RSS (Rich Site Summary). Here is what it looks like:

That's it. That's all there is. In fact, you can even minimize the sidebar:

Retin.us is based off of my Google Reader usage pattern:

J (key) - next
K (key) - previous
Ctrl + Enter - open selected article in new tab without losing focusing

When I open up my reader, I go through every unread item and open interesting articles in a new tab without losing focus. This is a bit different than most people who expect to read the article within their reader. There are many problems I found with this paradigm:

Long articles are unwieldy to read inline.
Collage based layouts are silly (Flipboard)
Some sites do not provide full articles in their RSS
Hacker News / Reddit subscriptions don't include any article data

As with my Google Reader app ZFeed, instead of relying on unreliable RSS feed data, I fetch a summary of each article using the embed.ly api. This way I can read the title and summary of an article before I make the decision to commit time to reading the whole thing.

There is still a lot more to come for Retin.us, but I have (as of last week) officially made it my RSS reader replacement. Expect another article soon about how it was built using Sails.js and Backbone. In the meantime, feel free to contribute on GitHub (GPL license).