Question

[lyaunzbe]

Hey zachary! This is a great HN reader you've built and I love the UX + design. I was reading through your code and was interested to see how the backend worked, particularly how you scrape or gather the HN posts (hnsearch or web scraping). Any chance some of the server side code will be open sourced?

[zacharydenton]

Thanks! In fact, the entire app is open source -- there's no server-side code except readability.coffee, and that's only because the Readability API doesn't do JSONP. The backend is basically the HNSearch API, which is quite flexible if you know a few tricks.

To see how the posts are gathered, take a look at posts_list.coffee. For the front page, I'm using YQL to parse this RSS feed, which is a chronological list of items posted to the front page (provided by HNSearch).