Really confused as to why "read the original site" is a feature. Getting mainly text, without the original site's design, is one of the best features of RSS to me.

> Really confused as to why "read the original site" is a feature.

Because the reader does not display images or resizes them, because it's an interesting blog post which probably has interesting comments, because the blog tends to be very well formatted, because there's a video or a slides deck embedded which simply does not appear in the reader, ...

I quite often make use of this feature in Reeder.

It's nice that newsblur is maintained by a HNer, but the aesthetics of it are a real turn off for me.

It's pretty minimal. Notice you don't even see a logo when you're reading sites. The dashboard is a bit dense, but the browsing experience can be customized.

This isn't exactly the best first impression ever: http://i.imgur.com/r2vwo.png

Went ahead and fixed that: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/commit/658a15701af7b6...

Thank you!

You have a skinny window. Resize by 200 pixels and it'll grow.