Posts in: January, 2006

• Additional fix for visual response when marking all unread items read. (forum thread)

We have been working hard on the backend to improve the performance of FeedLounge. We know performance is important to you, so keep watching this space to see more updates.

• System maintenance was a success. We mopped up a few spills, solidified a few more services, tweaked a few database server parameters, etc.
• Performance update: Logging of feed update activity is now done to MogileFS, offloading from the database. More changes to include MogileFS in the future where appropriate.
• Performance update: All preferences are now handled by a custom preference server, using Twisted and a BerkeleyDB backend, further offloading the database.
• More invalid character fixes.
• memcached is installed and running, with a small portion of the application in test. More caching updates to come as well.

Note: Loading items by feed tag is particularly slow, and we are profiling the application to find where the bottlenecks lie. Please be patient, and if you can, read items per feed for the interim. Just press the = key to expand/collapse a tag. If a tag is expanded, space bar navigation will move to each feed inside the tag.

• Trying to tag with a space ” ” no longer creates a UI element. (forum thread)
• Spacebar (and a few other keyboard shortcuts) should only do something in the Home view. (forum thread)
• Tagging items hits the appropriate item regardless of timing. (forum thread)
• Marking all unread items as read works and clears the items from the list. (forum thread)

FeedLounge was offline today from approximately 5 PM PST to 9 PM PST due to the database server becoming non-responsive to write operations.

We brought down the database server as gently as we could under the circumstances, and had the problem cleared by 7 PM PST. Once the problem was cleared, we took the time to investigate all of the server logs in some depth to make sure there wasn’t an underlying hardware problem that would require us to move the main database to one of our backup machines.

Everything checked out fine, and the Queue was brought back online to begin catching up just after 8 PM PST. The FeedLounge web interface was brought back online around 9 PM PST.

This was the first database problem we’ve had since we moved to PostgreSQL and we’re working to make sure we can recover more quickly from this kind of problem in the future.

In my attempts yesterday to attempt to more fully comply with Postel’s Law¹, I inadvertently prevented updating of all gzip compressed feeds. This includes feeds from sources like FeedBurner, MSDN, even our personal feeds. I apologize for the inconvenience, and the feeds are now updating properly again. This ‘gzip outage’ lasted about 16 hours, before being reported by several people in the forums. (forum thread, forum thread) Item updates should be coming shortly.

1. Stripping bad characters from offending feeds [back]

We’re getting some nice responses to FeedLounge already:

Stephen O’Grady:

now’s your chance to sign up for what I consider the best feed reading experience available.

DeWitt Clinton:

I had the pleasure of participating in their alpha program and think they have tremendous potential. That and they are simply very nice guys and I love the way they have communicated about building the product.

John Tokash:

The UI is more pleasant, professional and powerful than the other web based aggregators. Serious AJAX going on here.

Scott Jarkoff:

Does the service live up to the “hype” that has been growing since the announcement? While there are still some quirks to be ironed out, overall the service is exceptional.

Matt Tancock:

Bloglines is dead! Long live Feedlounge!

Chris Hubbs:

FeedLounge has an amazing user interface, good enough that though it’s just a web page, it tempts you to think that you’re running a separate application.

Andrew West:

I’ve been an alpha tester on the FeedLounge web-based RSS feed reader for six months or so, and I’m very impressed with it. It’s the only online service I’ve seen that handles my ~200 feeds without slowing down or just making a mess.

Justin Merz:

First and foremost you must remind yourself that this is not a desktop application. Which is hard to do with the amazing UI that feedlounge implements.

P.F. Flyer:

I admit I was skeptical while waiting for the public release. When it was finally released last week, I wasn’t incredibly impressed. It looked pretty much like any other RSS Reader. However, it took a day of playing around with it to truly begin to understand how different it was from the rest of the crowd.

Brainpipe:

And the highest praise of all: Finally, an online RSS reader that Just Works™.

Dougal Campbell:

This is one of the few web-based applications that I’d ever consider paying for.

It’s great to see this kind of response!

Of course, not all of the feedback has been positive. Some people strongly dislike the monthly fee¹, others have run into problems (many of which have been fixed). As Geof discusses, we’ve been very transparent about everything we’re doing here with FeedLounge² and we’ll keep working to make FeedLounge the best feed reading experience out there.

1. More on this in a future post. [back]
2. I’ve been tagging all FeedLounge mentions I see on del.icio.us [back]

• The “this item has no content” message is properly shown in the River of News (forum thread)
• New users have the “open links in new windows” preference set properly.
• Empty ‘tags’ in OPML import no longer prevent a user from logging in.

Several people have asked if they can take the 3 Hour Tour more than once. Absolutely - take it as often as you like. We just want to make sure everyone has a chance to try it out.

The 3 Hour Tour of FeedLounge is now available!

Go kick the tires, import your OPML and do some reading. Check out the keyboard navigation and the different views. Add some tags. We hope you’ll love it!

I’ve also added an FAQ that attempts to explain, in some depth, why the tour is limited to 3 hours and 50 users at a time.

Thanks for your patience while we got this up and running. There were several reasons for the delay. First we had an unexpected life issue pop up on us, then we decided to put the fixing of issues being reported by our current customers ahead of getting the tour up and running.

When you have a small team like we do, prioritizing things is always difficult. We know that we probably lost a few potential users by not having the tour ready to go earlier, but we decided it was more important to take care of the issues being raised by our current customers than it was to get the tour up earlier to attract new users. No apologies, this is the kind of tough decision we know we’ll need to make in the future as well.

• ‘q’ key works for all users. (forum thread)
• Suppress an error alert. (forum thread)
• Cancel works properly in Unsubscribe popup. (forum thread)
• Auto-clear exception messages.