Streetread: Google Reader meets Wall Street
Hey,
My latest web application went public today and I'd love to hear some input from everyone. The site is called Streetread. I've been dubbing it 'Google Reader meets Wall Street'. Streetread is a single-page ajax-driven interface that simplifies the process of gathering the large amount of news and data that flood Wall Street every day. The site aggregates the latest headlines from over 20 of the leading financial sites as well as from all of the stocks you choose to follow. The interface makes sifting through the content extremely easy and the articles are even presented within the same page. Basic stock charts/quotes display with the stocks you follow, etc. Please check it out and let me know what you think.
FYI: The site is powered mostly by jQuery. If anyone is interested in the backend and development process, I'd love to go into more detail.
Thanks,
Mike
Really no questions at all?
Really no questions at all? I'm surprised.
any legal issues with this
any legal issues with this type of aggregation?
Live hard, Ride harder
The feeds are available for
The feeds are available for non-commerical use basically. I was a little worried about the legal issues while creating the site but there are just so many sites out there that aggregate these feeds. I contacted a few companies and they just reiterating non-commercial. They shouldn't be mad because I'm just sending them traffic for free. If i ever want to run ads on here, I'll have to form partnerships or something.
Mike, Great looking site!
Mike,
Great looking site! What modules did use? You said that you used Jquery? Which plugins? Also, how did yo create the iFrame? Did you use the JFrame?
Very interested in hearing your story.
Thank you. As for modules,
Thank you.
As for modules, the main two that are important are Stockreader, which is something I wrote (handles just about everything on the site), and a slightly modified version of Aggregator. I edited aggregators cron to be controlled through Stockreader's settings. Instead of all the feeds updating every X minutes, Aggregator will now update say 25% of the feeds, every 15 minutes, to even disperse the load. Also, whenever a feed is refreshed/updated, Stockreader is called to format the feeds (html,css) and cache them in the DB, so when the AJAX calls are made to retrieve the feeds, you don't have to search through 100,000 feed items and loop 100 feeds to style them. Stockreader then tells aggregator which feeds to remove from the db (anything over the set amount of items, which is 100 now).
Yes, the pages are displayed with iframe. The iframe is set using absolute positioning but not displayed until a headline is clicked. jQuery then displays it and changes the src to the headlines address. It looks confusing but it is quite simple.
Hope that helps..
Forgot about jQuery
Forgot about jQuery plugins..
I created a plugin called Reader which handles just about the entire main interface. Also using Thickbox, for the symbol editing, SerialScroll, to scroll the symbols and icons, Tooltip/Dimensions, for the summaries.
Mike, very clever and useful
Mike, very clever and useful too. I'd be interested in knowing about the feed aggregration on the fly and then the formating. Also on your blog, the nice date icon is a good touch how?
TIA
Thank you. As I wrote above,
Thank you.
As I wrote above, the module I wrote to handle most of the things on this site formats then caches the feeds in the db. When users click on a stock or company, it simply pulls whichever feed was requested from that db so no more formatting needs to be done, and you don't need to select 100 feeds out of 100,000. Does that make sense?
I used the CSS from the Barlow theme for the date icons. I found a set of free calendar icons online and modified them with photoshop to look better. Download the theme and check it out. If you need more help or have any other questions, let me know.
What's the business model?
Not sure what kind of feedback you are looking for, so sorry if this is not on point.
I like the basic idea of your site. I think there is value in organizing and reshuffling news feeds in creative ways.
How does this site make money? Or is that a stupid question.
As to utility, i find the welcome screen a little off putting. Is it possible to put something up onto the main home page. Sort of like how google news works - there's some default headlines so it looks 'real' and a visitor can start doing something immediately. Then as you use and figure it out, you can customize to your specific interests.
As is, your site requires me to digest how the site works and then click on a link before i can actually see anything. I would say a lot of people will not have patience for that.
A small design point - on the pages with just the source feeds, the layout is so wide on my 1280 screen that it is hard to associate the headline with the date on the right. Also, is there a way to do mouseover article summaries or something to provide more info? Oh, I see you have that. Didn't see it initially - perhaps enable on link mouseover, not just looking glass. And also perhaps narrow the pop-up pane to 300px or 400px.
Have you considered a format like popurls.com? To me, that's perhaps an easier way to absorb a lot of headlines quickly. Though it lacks the kind of company structure you are shooting for.
Anyway, hope that helps.
Thank you. As of now, the
Thank you.
As of now, the site is not generating revenues but it isn't something I'm focused on at the moment. I am only concerned with promotion and user growth.
I've gotten comments about the home page being a little dull, and it definitely is. I'm not sure what should be added to it and my main concern is that since the main page is a full-screen interface, I was worried that content could force vertical scrollbars on smaller resolution screens. I'm going to mess around with a few ideas and see what I can come up with.
"As is, your site requires me to digest how the site works and then click on a link before i can actually see anything. I would say a lot of people will not have patience for that."
I understand what you're saying, but I feel the site is extremely straight forward and intuitive. The one-line directions are right in front of you, and clicking a symbol or icon is really all you have to do. How would you suggest fixing that issue?
The reason why I used the looking glass icons for the description is because only some stories have descriptions and if I were to have the mousover be on the story title, I felt users would get confused as to why some titles worked and some didn't. I understand your problem with the times being so far to the left. I also felt this was a little bit annoying but I couldn't think of any logical solution for it. Any suggestions??
And as for popurls, etc, there are just so many sites like that around, and so many similar ones as well (netvibes, my yahoo, etc). Also, my site has way too much data to have it all thrown on one page. Each source has up to 100 items, theres the stock charts, and company info links, etc. This to me seems much more useful and I always hated using popurls-like sites because it was too overwhelming having everything on one single page.
Thank you very much for your feedback.
following up
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I can appreciate your reaction to popurl style sites. There are a lot of them, but I find them interesting, though in fairness, I really don't use any of them on an on-going basis.
As for ideas re: your questions. I don't disagree that the site is intuitive. But people have fractional attention spans, so my best suggestion was what i already suggested which was to put some amount of content on the home page. Then in the time they are reading that, they can glance around at the other stuff and figure out what they want to look at. You are right that it isn't hard. But there really aren't too many sites you come across that are quite as empty as your home page. Wouldn't surprise me a decent number of people would figure the site was broken. Perhaps it's a paradigm breaking thing and it'll be all the rage or perhaps it is too much to ask of people. I really don't know. Just observing my reaction and a guess as to others.
As to the page width. Why not simply fix the width to something narrower? I didn't really think too hard on it, but it isn't obvious to me why fluid width is necessary. If width was fixed at, say, 1000px or whatever. Just playing around in firebug, i resized the site to your min width of 970px and it seemed to work fine - maybe even a bit better because the home page and other pages don't look so empty. i'm not sure how that works for the source frames, but it's an idea.
I'm going to screw around
I'm going to screw around with the dimensions and see if I can come up with something reasonable. And as for the home page, you're right, something is definitely needed.
how about adding "what
how about adding "what people are reading at the moment" or "most read" at the frontpage
Live hard, Ride harder
It's a great suggestion and
It's a great suggestion and I was considering it while developing. But it would not only take an large effort to do, it would also dramatically increase the load of the server. Mainly, I didn't believe it was a feature most people would use, being that the news around Wall Street is so diverse, most people only care about certain things. I am still thinking about it, and trying to determine how the best way to implement such a feature would be (suppose an ajax call to the server anytime a link is hit). Thanks for the comment.
No Opera
Sounds interesting, but you completely shut out Opera users.
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
At the time, Opera seems to
At the time, Opera seems to be completely incompatible with the jQuery plugin's I'm using, despite what their site says. I'm continuing to look into it. Sorry.
WOW, thats one of the most
WOW, thats one of the most creative uses of drupal i've seen, just shows u how flexiable drupal is...just a side note:
IMO i would prefer it if your "sliding bars" stayed at the top when i navigated to a site to read the article
Thank you. I surprised
Thank you. I surprised myself too and couldn't stop thinking about how flexible and amazing drupal really is. It really can be used to do anything. During development of this site, it was originally made to be a complete finance site with some really innovative features that I through together with drupal. I actually wrote 6 stock-related modules but had to toss everything for a handful of reasons. I wanted to keep the bars as you explained but space is limited and not everyone has a large resolution, etc.
Browser Incompatibility
The issue I had is that I tried to view the site using IE7 and was denied. I believe the reason may be caused by me having a stand-alone version of IE6 installed for testing. Shouldn't the site at least run, just maybe not run right? If it designed to restrict the browser that you can use on it, it seems as though something may have gotten missed somewhere.
Thanks,
Shane
Not liking IE 6.0
The site is not opening due to being incompatible on IE6.0
Surprised you would still
Surprised you would still get denied just because IE6 is installed. It uses jQuery to determine browser and version number. I wish IE6 was supported because a lot of people still do use it, but not a single layout segment or site feature works on IE6 and I don't think it even can. I also think it is much better to redirect users with incompatible browsers rather than having them show up to a butchered, functionless website and think that a 3 year old made it. Hopefully some people will either decide to upgrade IE or pop open another browser like Firefox.
If you want IE6 for testing reasons, I have an IE6 executable I could send you that doesn't require installation and works perfectly with IE7 installed. Or you could use that new freeware app IETester. Let me know if you want it..
Anyone know any good
Anyone know any good financial sites/blogs that may be interested in covering Streetread?
Hey if you guys like the
Hey if you guys like the site..please throw a digg on it..just submitted
http://digg.com/tech_news/Streetread_Google_Reader_meets_Wall_Street_3