Since introducing Stack News back in May we’ve gotten a lot of awesome feedback from the community. Today, we’re happy to announce the next major release for Stack News that includes a ton of improvements including a brand new reading experience, inside of StackShare.
New Features (tl;dr):
- Filter based on source - remove/add sources to make your filters more personalized
- Shareable News Filter URLs - quick way to share your filters with your team and friends
- Shareable URLs for tools, topics, sources, stacks, and Stackups - share more specific news filters with your team and friends
- Article reading - consume all the content you care about quicker and easier, inline
With these improvements, we’ve made Stack News more flexible, more shareable, and we’ve made it easier for you to consume content related to the technology you care about.
New Improvements
Some of the improvements we’ve made to the Stack News experience have been live for a few weeks now for many of you, but for those that haven’t seen them, listen up!
Filter based on source
Sometimes you don’t want to see every GitHub release, or every mention of a tool on Reddit. With the new source filters, you can simply click the source you want to disable and save that preference with your News Filter.
Shareable News Filter links
If you have saved News Filters, you can share them easily via a short URL.
Shareable URLs for tools, topics, sources, stacks, and Stackups
You can create and share links to any tool (https://stackshare.io/news/rails), and even scope those filters to a specific source (https://stackshare.io/news/heroku/hacker_news).
You can also keep up with tools that you don’t necessarily use, but may want to at some point via category filters (https://stackshare.io/news/devops, https://stackshare.io/news/continuous-integration/rss). We’ve gotten feedback that often times, you want to know what’s happening with a tool you use, but you also want to know what’s happening with a competitive tool because you’re looking to switch as soon as they add the features you need. Using a category filter lets you do this without having to specify each tool.
Visit any stack profile page, including your own, and you’ll see a news link:
This is great for sharing with your team, to help them stay sharp and up to date on the technology your company uses (here’s StackShare’s https://stackshare.io/news/stack/412/save).
We know how tough it can be to choose between tools- and reading the latest news and updates from all the options can often times help. So there’s now a News link on every comparison page:
Article Reading
Starting today, we’re introducing a brand new feature for everyone: Article Reading. There are a few pieces of feedback that led us to create a reading experience inside of Stack News:
Losing your place in the news feed when clicking out Opening tons of tabs is a hassle that is ok to deal with on leaderboard sites, but less useful on Stack News since it’s curated and personalized based on your stack People still have to use RSS readers like Feedly to consume the content, which makes Stack News less useful
We also saw that continuing to kick people out of StackShare via the Stack News UI, RSS feed, and digest emails, makes for an inconsistent and often times confusing experience.
When clicking on an article in Stack News, you’ll now see a clean, readable version of the article with only the content you care about, and none of the fluff. There are tools like Feedly, and even Pocket, and Instapaper to help you do this, but you can now read all of your tech stack news right here on StackShare, within the Stack News UI. If you want to read the article directly from it’s original source you can always click out to the original source.
You'll also notice that every article has its own permalink, so whenever you click through to an article from the daily or weekly digest, RSS feed, tweet, etc. you'll be taken to single article view:
We hope you enjoy all the new improvements to Stack News- we'd love to hear your feedback! Click the question mark in the bottom right corner to send us a note :)
- Yonas