Posts in: July, 2005

We’ve placed our first order for servers!

Some of servers we ordered last night will be used to power the web interface for FeedLounge (basically, the web servers for the service) and some will be used on the back end to download feeds. With build and shipping time, the servers should be to us in about 2 weeks.

Still to be ordered: the database servers. If you have good/bad experiences with various server brands, we’re interested. We’re looking at a ZT Group’s offerings for our database servers.

Since FeedLounge is using so many modern web application techniques to deliver the user experience, we occasionally run across issues that look suspiciouly like browser bugs. We want to make sure these get reported and fixed (either in our code or in the browser’s code), so we’d like to invite a developer or two from all browser teams to join our alpha test.

We feel that this will be a mutually beneficial arrangement:

1. We push the limits of the browser and potentially find bugs that don’t normally get surfaced, report them to you (the browser developer) and provide test and use cases.
2. Bugs that affect FeedLounge get fixed (or we get work-arounds for them) which is a great thing for our users.

If you are a browser developer and are a feed reading fan or are just curious to see what we’ve got going on here, please get in touch - we’d love to work with you.

Right now we use AJAX to store each user’s preferences (current feed/tag/item, which tags are open in the feeds list, etc.) on the server, maintaining a single consistent experience across any browsers and computers someone is using. There are a lot of benefits to this, it’s often great to be able to pick up right where you left off.

However, we’ve also considered taking a different route: storing preferences (for things liks open/closed feed tags, selected item, etc.) in a browser cookie. This would allow you to have a “work” profile and a “home” profile of sorts.

How do you read? Which would you prefer? We want your feedback…

We’ve moved my.feedlounge.com to an interim dedicated server as planned - performance is much, much better.

The usage numbers that we get from the alpha users on this server over the next few weeks will help us ensure we have a successful beta launch.

One of our #1 goals for the alpha release was to guage how much hardware we needed to have in place for our beta release. Over the last few weeks, we feel like we’ve gotten the information we were looking for; and it’s a fairly sizeable bit of infrastructure.

We’ve got a lot of things in motion right now:

• We’re in the process of setting up an interim dedicated server for FeedLounge so that we can bring on a few more alpha users and get some final performance metrics without the other box activity cluttering up the numbers.
• We’re finishing our business incorporation, setting up bank accounts, etc. etc.
• We’re getting ready to purchase a number of servers which will all need to be configured.
• We’re deciding on a datacenter to put our hardware into and getting that set up.
• Oh yeah, and we’ve got a bunch more software development on the list too.

While we’re committed to making a free version of FeedLounge available, we’re also committed to making sure the service can sustain itself. We have a few creative ideas in mind regarding revenue that we’ll be talking about more as we get closer to a beta launch. Luckily, there are people out there who are willing to pay for online services (well, at least one).

Getting a service like this ready to go is expensive, both in time and money. Unfortunately, there aren’t shortcuts for either.

While we know that many of you are eagerly awaiting the beta release; we also know that a premature release won’t be good for anyone. Your patience is greatly appreciated.

One of the things I enjoy with FeedLounge is the way you can go from one computer to another, log in, and be right where you were. This is one of the cool things about using AJAX extensively in a web application. We can keep track of changes as they happen so your user experience is pretty much seemless between sessions, browsers, machines, etc.

We’ve been hard at work since the last release: refactoring and optimizing code, fixing bugs and generally making our foundation more stable.

The Alpha 3 release includes over 100 tracked fixes and enhancements, plus a few dozen more that were made along the way. Some of the notable changes include:

• A complete rewrite of the feed refreshing process. It is now multi-threaded and using our smart update schedule. The update process now comes calling with a FeedLounge user agent which includes not only how many subscribers this feed has in FeedLounge, but also when we’ll be back to check again.
• A new toolbar for the feeds list, completing the contextual toolbar implementation.
• Revamped pop-up windows that keep the buttons on the screen at all times.
• Support for Page Up and Page Down keys in the feeds and items lists, and the ability to open and close tags in the feeds list using the ‘=’ key.
• A new preference setting lets you choose the default state of the ’save items until I delete them’ options when subscribing to new feeds and importing OPML.
• OPML export (the link is in Settings - My Account).
• Lots and lots and lots of little changes and fixes - both front and back-end.

Now that we feel we’ve shored up areas of the platform that needed it and spackled a few nail holes, our plan moving forward is to push out more feature focused releases on a faster timeframe. Having more bite size releases rather than cooking up a whole meal for each release should help us get specific testing and feedback on these features from our alpha users faster, and should make the releases easier for us to manage.

Last but certainly not least, a well-deserved pat on the back to Brian who did a great job knocking tons of bugs off the list to get this release ready to go.

I was curious if our browser stats had changed much since we posted them a few days after the initial alpha launch.

A quick look at the top user agents showed this breakdown:

• Mozilla/Firefox/Camino/etc. = 46.09%
• IE = 8.27%
• Safari = 6.26%
• Opera = .47%

I didn’t count anything with less than 1%, but then I threw in Opera too.

Now that there’s been a little wider testing, it seems I was a little overly optimistic when I mentioned we might already have Safari support in FeedLounge. Everything works fine with the layout and the mouse, but the keyboard navigation doesn’t work the same. It’ll be fixed before beta.

If there is anyone out there on the Safari team that would like to join the alpha test and help us track down tough Safari issues, please get in touch.