<metaname="description"content="NewsBlur is a personal news reader that brings people together to talk about the world. A new sound of an old instrument."/>
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<p>It was a little under a year ago that I declared <ahref="http://blog.newsblur.com/2021/06/21/2016-06-01-twitters-back-baby.html">Twitter back, baby</a> on this blog. In that time, NewsBlur users have created over 80,000 Twitter feeds in NewsBlur. Since it’s such a popular feature, I decided to dive back into the code and make tweets look a whole lot better.</p>
<p>Notice that NewsBlur now natively supports expanding truncated URLs (no more t.co links).</p>
<p>And NewsBlur also supports native quoted tweets, where a user links to a tweet in their own tweet. NewsBlur expands the quoted tweet and blockquotes it for convenience.</p>
<p>Plus retweets now show both the original tweet author and the retweeting author. This means that you can quickly scan tweets and see where the retweet originated from. And retweeted tweets that quote their own tweets also get expanded.</p>
<p>It’s almost as if NewsBlur is inching closer and closer to becoming its own full fledged Twitter client. While NewsBlur already hit <ahref="http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html">Zawinski’s Law</a> (“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”) by supporting <ahref="http://blog.newsblur.com/2021/06/21/2016-07-01-newsletters-in-your-newsblur.html">email-newsletters-to-rss</a>, Twitter is coming up fast.</p>
<p>Speaking of which, I have this idea I’ve been noodling about better supporting Twitter habits that need to become less of a habit. I want to be able to automatically follow people from my Twitter tweetstream in NewsBlur based the frequency of their posting. I want to be able to infrequently dip into Twitter but still read the tweets from people who only post once a week or once a day.</p>
<p>In other words, I want Twitter, the RSS killer, to better integrate with an RSS reader so that I can pull out the good stuff from the unending flow of tweets. RSS means never missing anything, but Twitter’s main use case is anathema to how we use RSS. I don’t like to preannounce features, but this one intrigues me and if you agree, please share this story to let me know or to give me feedback on how you would like to see NewsBlur be a better Twitter client.</p>
<p>Saved searches are great for creating custom feeds with just the stories you want. Think of these new feeds as spotlights on parts of a folder or feed, ways to keep track of stories that share a theme across different sites.</p>
<p><strong>This is it, the final countdown!</strong></p>
<p>Tonight at 8pm PT the <ahref="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samuelclay/turn-touch-beautiful-control/">Turn Touch campaign</a> will end and the project will be successfully funded. Judging from the $50,000 raised already, I think Turn Touch has a long life ahead of it.</p>
<h5id="watch-the-2-minute-demo-on-vimeo"><ahref="https://vimeo.com/207556527">Watch the 2 minute demo on Vimeo</a></h5>
<p>Apart from being the only remote control in the world built for a news reader, Turn Touch is the handiest shortcut for your lights, music, and apps. It’s basically a customizable remote with a knack for smart homes.</p>
<p>Supporting Turn Touch is a way of supporting NewsBlur. They are part of the same suite of productivity tools made by the <ahref="https://twitter.com/samuelclay">same person</a>. By buying a Turn Touch and backing this Kickstarter, you’re continuing to fund the development of great tools.</p>
<p>So please <ahref="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samuelclay/turn-touch-beautiful-control/">head to Kickstarter and buy yourself the $59 mahogany remote</a>, even if you do not yet have any smart home devices. This remote is the easiest way to start connecting your home.</p>
<p>This is big. It means you can wake up in the morning, grab a cup of coffee, and cycle through news from across the room. Or, hook your Mac up to a display (maybe your living room TV) and skip through photo blogs, headlines, and the day’s best writing.</p>
<p>It’s kind of like getting a new set of speakers. Where before, you’d be chained to your computer with headphones; now, you can listen to music from anywhere you’d like. With Turn Touch, you can leave your computer and read the news no matter what you’re doing— laundry, the dishes, or enjoying a lazy Sunday on your couch.</p>
<p><ahref="https://turntouch.com/kickstarter">Turn Touch is on Kickstarter</a>. Back the project to get your very own. Or—and this is my sincere recommendation—get the complete set, save some money, and give one away to a friend.</p>
<p>I’ve been working on Turn Touch for years and I hope it shows.</p>
<p>I have something very exciting to share with you today. I’ve been working on a secret project called Turn Touch and I’m just about ready to show it to you. <ahref="https://www.turntouch.com">Signup on turntouch.com</a> to find out.</p>
<p>It’s a new kind of device and it’s machined out of solid wood. I built it to last, much like my other projects (for instance the news reader you’re likely reading this in). Turn Touch is built for NewsBlur, among many other things.</p>
<p>Turn Touch will be launching on Kickstarter next week and I want to ask for your help. When I launch my campaign I’m going to need people like you to share it with people who look to you for recomendations on what’s good. You already use NewsBlur, so you’re already known for having good taste.</p>
<p>Now, you probably want to know what Turn Touch is and actually looks like, yeah? Then <ahref="https://www.turntouch.com">signup on turntouch.com</a>.</p>
<p>You’ll get to preview the Kickstarter campaign and offer me any feedback you have. You’ll get to see Turn Touch and find out what it offers you.</p>
<p>I’ve been working on this as a side project for that past few years. And by signing up you’ll have the first access to it.</p>
<p>Version 5.0 has a bunch of new features. It’s got new gestures, better looking icons and thumbnail previews, and little UI design details to better match the rest of NewsBlur.</p>
<p>This is a seriously cool feature and I’m glad it’s ready to launch. The dashboard river, the real-time stream of the top five stories of All Site Stories, is now on the dashboard of the web app.</p>
<p>After testing this feature for the past few weeks I now realize that I could not live without it. By having the latest stories always loaded and instantly ready to go, I leave NewsBlur open and just take a quick glance to see if the top of my list is interesting.</p>
<p>It also loads instantly, which means that if you see a story you want to read, clicking on it brings up the text without taking a single moment.</p>
<p>One big change that this necessitated was the handling of the Text view when reading by folders. Used to be that a folder got its own feed/text/story view and every feed had to stay with the same story view. But on iOS and Android it’s different. Every feed gets to keep its own feed/text/story setting.</p>
<p>This is now how it works on the web. If you read on feed by its Text (extracted original text) view and another by its Feed view, then you are automatically switched between the two views. Quite a bit of logic had to accomodate scrolling (you don’t automatically switch, since that would throw you from one scroll viewport into another) and switching between stories.</p>
<p>Enjoy the dashboard river. And if you look closely you might even see the next big feature that itself is about to launch soon.</p>
<p>Check it out, David Berlin built <ahref="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/apple-store/id1080200978?mt=8">Newsreel</a>, a NewsBlur client for Apple TV. And from my first impression, it rocks. Just take a look at these screenshots.</p>
<p>You can download <ahref="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/apple-store/id1080200978?mt=8">download Newsreel on the App Store</a>. What a beautiful app and it goes to show how nice it is to be able to read your news on a big screen.</p>
<p>It’s been three years to the day that Google Reader shut down. And here’s a feature they could never build. Introducing email newsletters in your RSS reader.</p>
<p>You can now forward your email newsletters over to NewsBlur and then read your email newsletters right in your browser/phone/TV/tablet. A couple dozen users have been beta testing this feature for the last couple of months and everybody agrees, this feature is amazing.</p>
<p>Here’s the best part. If you get a lot of newsletters, you can group them into folders and even train them to highlight the newsletters you want to read first.</p>
<p>Setting up newsletters on NewsBlur is easy. Just follow the personalized instructions on the web by going to Manage > Email Newsletters on either the web dashboard or the manage menu.</p>
<p>You might ask why not just subscribe your custom NewsBlur newsletter email address directly to the newsletter instead of forwarding copies of the newsletter. The answer is that if you want a single source of truth for where newsletters are going, you want that in your email client and not on NewsBlur. If you ever change news readers (and with new features like this, why would you want to) you’ll want to change only a single filter rule instead of dozens of newsletter emails.</p>
<p>And with this huge new feature, NewsBlur just became even better. NewsBlur has branched beyond RSS for a while now, fetching Twitter and YouTube stories even without RSS. With newsletters, NewsBlur becomes your single source.</p>
<p>If you have suggestions on what NewsBlur can help you read next, post an idea on the <ahref="http://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur">Get Satisfaction forums</a>.</p>
<p>It’s been too long. Twitter <ahref="https://blog.twitter.com/2013/api-v1-retirement-final-dates">unceremoniously knee-capped their API</a> a few years ago and a number of solutions popped up to fix the loss. However, those stopgaps also closed and left us with no good ways to read Twitter while in NewsBlur. Until now, that is.</p>
<p>You can now subscribe to <strong><ahref="https://twitter.com/">https://twitter.com/</a><em>username</em></strong> to get individual Twitter accounts on NewsBlur. Put them all in a folder to recreate your tweetstream.</p>
<p>Not only do you get the full tweetstream for that user, but you can also filter out tweets that are replies, retweets, or contain any text in them. You can also train Twitter feeds to highlight tweets that contain photos, are retweeted or liked, or have a word you want.</p>
<p>YouTube also deprecated their API and NewsBlur came to the rescue with <ahref="http://blog.newsblur.com/2021/06/21/2015-04-30-a-real-solution-to-the-deprecated-youtube-api.html">native YouTube API support</a>. Now Twitter joins that list of native support, giving you a better Twitter experience than ever before.</p>
<p>And because this native Twitter support takes more work than normal RSS feeds do, this feature is only available to premium subscribers.</p>
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<p>NewsBlur is a personal news reader that brings people together to talk about the world.<br/>
