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Comment by stenl | Hacker News Reader

I made a simple service for myself (http://paperfeed.io) which is a feed of all the new papers in journals I care about. I can "star" papers for reading later. Works extremely well for my habits.

You're welcome to try it (not sure if the signup workflow still works; let me know). I'll be happy to hear your feedback.

Edit: you can upvote papers, and they'll float to the top just like on HN.

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This might be off topic but would you mind sharing how you wrote the website and if you have any tutorial that you can recommend? I want to design something extremely similar for a different application but I do not have much knowledge in web development (I am more experience in programming for numerical and data analysis). I figure this might be a good project to get my feet wet. Thanks!

Not the OP, but this looks like an nginx-powered API (which may be coming through a reverse-proxy) that returns JSON, and Bootstrap 3 + KnockoutJS for the client side to render it all. That doesn't answer your questions about the OP's thought and design processes but maybe it'll give you something to read up.

Exactly. The API is written in Go (because I wanted to learn it), and there's a Postgres database behind it, and a background Go process that scans the journals for updates. I recently rewrote the client in React as a learning exercise, but haven't made the switch yet

If I restarted from scratch I would do the server-side in Python because there's just a lot more good libraries available.

Hmm, I've been thinking about learning Go or Rust since they've been almost on the front page of hacker news lately. Is it worth it or should I stick with Python?

It's always worth learning something new. I don't mean to sound like a dick when I say that, but it's true; build yourself a little API in Go with the help of https://gobyexample.com and see if it's right for you. We really cannot tell you if it will be worth your salt for your particular project. Structure your application in a manner that if you decide to throw it out and replace it with C# tomorrow, your client won't know the difference.

In my case, I really enjoy Go, but certainly not all the time. It has its place. You may find either that it's the best thing ever, or that you cannot stand how it does X, and Python does it so much better. Some comparisons are objective, but the things that make or break it for you may be subjective.

Thanks! It gives me at least a direction I should start!

Great! How did you manage the different feeds? I did something similar for my field but its a nightmare since some journals violate the rss, or dump metadata in the feed (my shameless plug is http://sciboards.com)

I have slightly different parsers for each family of journals. I use the DOI to get the metadata where possible. Then I reformat to show title, authors and journal consistently. I also create a direct link to the PDF where possible because I prefer to get at the paper with a single click.

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