Daisy & Daisy Sans. Clean up your feed

NetNewsWire themes by Shane Hendry

Priya Nair for Slab
Podcast episode 129
The lobby is not your living room

Every new office tower now has a lobby that is, according to the brochure, “a living room for the city.”1 I have been in a lot of living rooms. None of them had a security desk.

A welcoming threshold where the city meets the workplace, designed to invite lingering, conversation, and spontaneous encounters.

The tell is the furniture. A real living room has a chair someone has been sitting in for years. A lobby living room has this instead:2

  • Six identical chairs, each placed to look casual and none comfortable enough to risk staying in.
  • A coffee table with three books nobody has opened.
  • One plant, watered on a schedule by a contractor.

Then there is the ceiling. Somewhere between forty and sixty feet up, depending on how much the developer wanted to impress the bank, a very expensive light fixture hangs over nothing at all. You are meant to look up and feel something. What most people feel is that the heating bill is going to be unreal.

I do not think the architects are lying, exactly. I think they are being asked to describe a lobby as something other than a lobby, and the only vocabulary available is borrowed from homes. So the reception desk becomes a “hearth,” the revolving door becomes an “arrival experience,” and the bench nobody sits on becomes a “moment of pause.”

My modest proposal: call it a lobby. Put in one chair that is actually good. Let the rest be a hallway, which is a perfectly fine thing for a building to have, and which has never once been accused of pretending to be a house.

That would not make for a very good brochure. It might, however, make for a building people are glad to walk through on a Monday.

9:41
Jonah Reyes for Gravel Brain
reyes recap
how bikepacking ruined my relationship
Two small tents and two loaded bikes at a wooded campsite

two tents. we packed light, apparently, but not that light.

it started innocently. we bought one tent. by day three we owned two, and by day four we were not speaking in either of them.

nobody tells you that sleeping eight inches apart in a tube of nylon is a very different thing from sharing a couch. you can hear every breath. you can hear the exact moment someone decides not to say something.

the bikes, for the record, were fine.

Get Daisy Get Daisy Sans

Daisy’s house style

What sets Daisy apart is its house style for article headers. Every post opens the same way, so a mixed feed is easy to scan and predictable to swipe through.

It’s all done with built-in JavaScript rules. No AI is involved. RSS posts are all structured the same way, with fields like <author>, <title>, and <pubDate>. The rules mostly look at these header fields to clean up sloppy and redundant content.

Unedited

9:41

Daisy’s house style

9:41

A few example rules

The rules are just broad enough to catch common cases, yet careful enough to leave everything else alone. Daisy also recognizes over 100 popular podcasts, newsletters, and recurring columns by name, so it can confidently distinguish labels from headlines. See all the rules.

Try Daisy’s house style

9:41

I know this is controversial. Stepping between an author and a reader is in some ways counter to what I love about RSS.

My goal is to polish the overall RSS experience and present authors’ content as faithfully as I can. I stress-tested and refined the rules to avoid mangling headlines, and they focus only on redundant content and tacked-on labels. Is it bulletproof? No way. But my feed is a lot nicer in Daisy’s house style.

Footnotes for everyone

Authors and book lovers nerd out on footnotes but many readers rarely engage with them or don’t understand how they work, so I designed footnotes that are easy for everyone. Try them below.

9:41

Other content and design niceties

Code blocks

Most style guides agree that a heading should never end on a single stranded word. It looks careless, and it makes a long title harder to scan. The fix is one line of CSS that you can add to any heading, byline or caption, and the browser handles the rest.

CSS
/* no lone words */
h1, .byline {
  text-wrap: pretty;
}

Nothing else about the page changes. Short titles stay short and long ones settle into even lines, each with a few words at the end instead of just one. Pair it with a sensible measure and your headings will look edited even when nobody edited them.

Social media

u/oddsock in r/rss

My 4,000 unread items are not a backlog. They’re a lifestyle.

Join the conversation

For readers everywhere

Daisy and Daisy Sans support 30+ languages. They rewrite whole phrases so they read naturally, instead of replacing individual words.

Attribution

Sabine Corliss and 2 others for Metro Daily
City adds bike lane, forgets the bikes

Council voted 7 to 2 on Tuesday to paint a lane on a road with no room for one. Cyclists say the lane ends at the first driveway. The city says that is the point.

Languages

Author for Publication
Slow down, ride more

Daisy rewrites whole phrases, so every language reads the way a native speaker would say it.

Try it

Daisy and Daisy Sans are in beta, and you can download them to try them in NetNewsWire. I’d love any feedback.

Updates

Version 0.5

View release notes
  • Code blocks. Code now has syntax highlighting, shows the language, and has a Copy button.
  • Tall media. Images, videos and embeds stay centered and stay fully in-view.
  • Update notices. When a newer release exists, a short note and link to update appears at the end of articles. Daisy and Daisy Sans check one small file on this project's GitHub Pages site at most once a day, and send nothing about you, your feeds or your articles.
  • Lead lists. Links in a list at the start of a post no longer shift when you hover over them.

View all releases

Credits

Daisy and Daisy Sans were designed and built by Shane Hendry, using Dave Marquard’s NetNewsWire theme template, and with the help of Claude Code.

Daisy and Daisy Sans aren’t affiliated with or endorsed by NetNewsWire or any of the authors or publications whose feeds the themes have rules for. The theme format is documented in NetNewsWire’s themes technote.