Announcing rationalist blog aggregator

post by nerfhammer · 2011-09-29T19:34:13.363Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 26 comments

Contents

26 comments

After input from many of you guys and the NYC group, I am announcing planetrationalist.com

There's a lot of different directions this sort of idea could go in, but I figured that this could be a good-enough first effort.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

26 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by Elo · 2016-07-04T04:01:42.194Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The feed is shit and needs some pruning. Will this happen, or should a new feed be made?

comment by handoflixue · 2011-09-29T19:56:52.792Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The connection has timed out.

The server at planetrationalist.com is taking too long to respond.

Replies from: MichaelHoward, nerfhammer
comment by MichaelHoward · 2011-09-29T21:22:21.992Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It seems fine for me now.

If not for you, maybe check down for everyone or just me.

Replies from: handoflixue
comment by handoflixue · 2011-09-29T22:21:49.255Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It seems to have resolved itself, but thanks - I should have thought to check that and included the result either way :)

Replies from: MichaelHoward
comment by MichaelHoward · 2011-09-30T00:24:42.256Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Funnily enough it was down when I first read your comment, as were downforeveryone.com, isup.me, & all similar suggestions Google had.

comment by nerfhammer · 2011-09-29T22:40:59.507Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

May not have been just you, I suspect my ISP was having problems earlier.

comment by curiousepic · 2011-09-30T15:35:46.179Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Any hope of toggleable sources?

Replies from: nerfhammer
comment by nerfhammer · 2011-09-30T16:11:39.124Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Meaning you want to turn some sources off?

Replies from: curiousepic
comment by curiousepic · 2011-09-30T17:53:05.002Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yes.

Replies from: Document, nerfhammer
comment by Document · 2011-10-01T04:22:56.731Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Element Hiding Helper may or may not help.

comment by nerfhammer · 2011-09-30T18:13:41.254Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Options for now:

  • create a greasemonkey script to hide posts from the sources you don't want. Every source has a unique CSS class so it should be trivial.
  • create a yahoo pipe to filter the sources you don't want through the rss feed and read it through a feed reader
  • clone the set of sources using the OPML feed in your feed reader of choice and add/remove whatever you want from the source list. However, this will not be kept in sync in the likely event that the official set of sources should change.

Out of curiosity, what don't you want to see and why?

Replies from: curiousepic
comment by curiousepic · 2011-09-30T19:56:49.207Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I like the aggregation, but there are a lot of posts for each day. I just thought it would be nice to reduce the amount to something manageable to cover in a few minutes a day, and to be able to choose which sources. Of course this is available with RSS and whatnot, it's probably not something you need to focus on soon.

comment by djcb · 2011-10-02T18:08:32.835Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I like it! Thanks for providing this.

Only minor quibble is the fact that some of the blogs only put a short snippet in their RSS-feed. As I like reading things in a feed-reader (actually, feed2imap + my e-mail client), having to open a browser to read things is small nuisance.

So, as a small feature request, maybe offer a way to filter the feeds to only get the ones that have the full text in their feed?

Replies from: nerfhammer
comment by nerfhammer · 2011-10-03T15:26:40.665Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I've thought of ways of working around this. There are ways of actually defeating the truncation. One issue is that there isn't necessarily an obvious programmatic way of telling which feeds are truncated and which aren't.

For now, try out this feed proxy: http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/ , e.g. http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/feed?url=http%3A//feeds.feedburner.com/planetrationalist

Replies from: djcb
comment by djcb · 2011-10-08T08:14:32.368Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks - will try that!

comment by Lapsed_Lurker · 2011-10-02T17:31:41.182Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I've checked out planetrationalist.com several times in the past few days, finding interesting stuff to read. So, you get my upvote.

comment by [deleted] · 2011-09-30T19:22:06.289Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Sweet. I endorse you doing things. You need share buttons - I want to be able to send these articles out or tweet them with a click.

Replies from: nerfhammer
comment by nerfhammer · 2011-09-30T20:20:55.192Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Hmm, I was wondering how much people used those things. Do you want just twitter + email? Facebook?

Replies from: None
comment by [deleted] · 2011-10-03T03:18:55.898Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

All of the above, I'd just install some basic set of sharing buttons. Email, twitter, facebook, maybe Google+.

Replies from: nerfhammer
comment by nerfhammer · 2011-10-03T15:33:41.543Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I've re-instated twitter so far. The issues are: general visual clutter, I found a way to mitigate this issue by using a trick to force lower the visual contrast of the buttons, and that these social buttons often really slow down the loading of the page, especially if you want the dynamic share/like/retweet counters for every item. I might leave the counter on twitter but omit it for the others and see what the page load is like.

I'm not sure what email-sharing service to use... facebook has one in its "share" button, there are probably others.

comment by FiftyTwo · 2011-09-30T17:03:37.122Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Very interesting, I suspect I will spend a lot of time reading this.

How are you defining rationalist for these purposes? How are you selecting the blogs?

Replies from: nerfhammer
comment by nerfhammer · 2011-09-30T18:37:43.241Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

To be completely honest, I wasn't going on a strict definition of the term rationalist; frankly I consider the term kind of flawed anyway. But I don't have a better replacement in mind. For me it means being interested in being rational, being interested in how the mind works, being interested in cognitive biases, Bayes' rule, probability, statistics, logical fallacies, and scientific self-improvement.

  • I selected the sources starting with lesswrong and overcoming bias, then taking suggestions from people, doing some rudimentary graph analysis, manually adding blogs of authors in related fields, watching what sources I selected linked to themselves.
  • I tried to include sources that were readable but not gimmicky (e.g. top 7 secret tips to supercharge your goals!!!). Sometimes sources vary outside this interval, and I don't have any filtration sophisticated enough to handle this.
  • I selected against sources that posted too frequently, anything political, anything that seemed angry or upbraiding or read like a manifesto. I included some sources which include these but against which I was able to filter out the political etc. posts easily. The rudimentary methods I used to filter topics doesn't work perfectly, though.
  • I tried to include a few sources from less closely related subjects that were high quality and don't seem to post that frequently. For instance, I included only a couple skeptic blogs, but there are tons and tons of them out there and I feel that it's a different niche that's already addressed pretty well elsewhere. Some fields I avoided almost entirely like entrepreneurship or economics.
  • I tried to not let any one subject dominate the set of sources. I feel like I included too many psychology blogs, for example.
comment by Dreaded_Anomaly · 2011-09-29T22:53:28.434Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I am impressed. (I would be marginally more impressed if the site gained a favicon.)

Replies from: nerfhammer, shokwave
comment by nerfhammer · 2011-09-30T14:20:39.140Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yeah I couldn't think of one.

Favicon contest?

comment by shokwave · 2011-09-30T00:12:26.137Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I suggest the Google Chrome default favicon with a big coloured R in the middle.

Replies from: nerfhammer