Unofficial UI for news.ycombinator.com

This project was started out of frustration from lack of proper mobile layout and other minor annoyances. The main goal of the project is to give a more user friendly interface that should work on every platform. Mobile support is especially important.

Current features:

• Frontpage submissions and some simple sorting/filtering of those (new, top, Ask HN, etc.).
• Full support for comments viewing including polls and Ask HN posts.
• Can act as an API in reddit style (append .json to any page to get json output).
• Responsive layout thanks to Bootstrap (with some tweaking).
• Some comment enhancements like original posters name in a different color and comment collapsing. More planned.

Written in Python 2.7 and uses the following:

• Django
• Bootstrap as a CSS framework
• BeautifulSoup for parsing HTML
• Sass/Compass for CSS
• jQuery
• PostgreSQL
• Various timezone/time packages
• Check requirements.txt for a full list of Python packages

Currently the project scrapes news.ycombinator.com directly which leads to some problems:

• One major problem is being unable to scrape older comments too often
  • The "official" api HNSearch doesn't allow fetching by id rendering it completely useless for my use and most of the other unofficial apis have some problems with the formatting.
• Semi-random banning of the scrape IP.
  • Normally I would just scrape with different IP addresses, but currently the project is hosted on AppFog free tier which only gives me one IP. I have a working port for Google App Engine, but for some reason it is unable to scrape HN at all.

Hosted on http://hn.cxhristian.com