In the 3 pane view, the “Category” column is now replaced with “Feed Name” when viewing items by feed tag. When viewing items by feed, the column shows the item category as it did previously.
This was requested in the forums.
The last 48 hours have been pretty crazy.
All in all, the FeedLounge launch has been a success. I’m very pleased to see notes from happy users, and we’ve gotten a number of nice e-mails as well.
No matter how much testing you do, there will always be hiccups in a live launch. We ran into some payment and account activation issues in the first couple of hours. There was also an issue with our auto-tagging from OPML categories that would pop up in certain situations with OPML import. These have all been identified and have been fixed or have a work-around and will be fixed soon.
We had planned to go live with the 3 Hour Tour yesterday, unfortunately an unplanned circumstance has prevented that. There is no current ETA for the 3 Hour Tour to go live, however it is close to being ready and is one of our highest priorities when Scott gets back. We appreciate your patience.
I’ve just pushed a number of changes to the live system. A handful of bug fixes, and also a small feature. We’re working through the rest of the bug reports and feature requests. Fixing what needs fixing and adding more to our “future” list.
There are still PayPal issues affecting a couple of users that have tried to sign up using they PayPal balance as a funding option. This works fine in our testing and a call to PayPal support confirmed that it is supposed to work. Their suggestion is to have the user contact PayPal directly to resolve any issues with their account. That isn’t exactly the smooth user experience we were going for, but we knew that using PayPal to handle payments to start would have some tradeoffs.
Again, thanks for your patience until we make the free tour available and special thanks to all our users for their wonderful feedback.
Scott and I are very proud to announce the FeedLounge Public Release!
Can’t wait any longer? You can sign up right now and read the rest of this later, we understand - it’s been a long wait. 
As promised, we are offering a free demo of FeedLounge with our “3 Hour Tour”. Each tour is limited to 50 people - this ensures that everyone will get a chance to try it out without completely overloading the demo box in the process (many simultaneous OPML imports are resource intensive). Unfortunately, our tour director got lost this morning so we’ve had to delay the first 3 Hour Tour for just a bit. He called us a little while ago and assured us he was on his way and would be here shortly.
To support the public release, we have overhauled the web site (you are looking at the new one - the old one looked like this) and added more resources to the support section. The Getting Started tutorial has been updated to match the current functionality in FeedLounge - it’s only a few pages and it’s worth checking out.
We’ve also got a buttons page to make it easy for you to add the little “Subscribe in FeedLounge” buttons to your web site. The buttons we have available right now are pretty basic. If you’re the artistic type, please make us some better buttons and/or banners. If we decide to use the buttons/banners you submit, we’ll give you a free month in FeedLounge as a thank you.
The forums and comments are open, we look forward to your feedback.
UPDATE (Jan 17, 11:25 PST): The 3 Hour Tour launch will be delayed a bit longer due to some unfortunate circumstances.
If you’re seeing this, you’re seeing the site on the new server.
The web site and forums are moving to a server that can better handle the load. Comments are closed now, and the forums will be shut down for the move shortly. Once the new server is up, we’ll update DNS and have redirects here.
See you in a bit…
We’re now live on alpha 8!
Notable changes since alpha 7:
Monday is coming fast, so please let us know in the forums about anything that doesn’t look just right.
Right now we’ve got the FeedLounge reader (the ‘Lounge as we refer to it internally) running on: “my.feedlounge.com”.
I’m not sure that “my.” is really the best URL for the ‘Lounge1, and if we’re going to change it we have to do so before Monday.
Here is the result of our 1 minute micro brainstorm:
The comments are open - I hope you guys have some good ideas!
Whitney McNamara is asking for opinions on FeedLounge over at seamonkeyrodeo.
Why don’t a few of you alpha testers out there head over and give him an opinion?
As previously discussed, next Monday will be the initial public release of FeedLounge. We’ve done quite a bit of number crunching with the data collected during our alpha testing, and we’ve finalized the pricing structure for our beta release.
We believe that this pricing will work on both sides of the equation. It will allow us to cover server, bandwidth and development costs so that the service can be trusted to be viable and self-sustaining; and it is low enough (about the cost of a fast food meal) that it shouldn’t be a financial burden to those wanting to use the service.
There has been a lot of discussion recently about web 2.0 applications and struggles with reliability. There are very real expenses that go along with running a service like this and no one will be happy if we aren’t able to grow our infrastructure along with our user base. We are very cognizant of the challenges that lie ahead in offering this type of service, and we are doing our best to act responsibly towards our users.
As a thank you and as previously promised, all alpha users (regardless of their participation level) will be given a 2 month credit as a thank you for their help in the alpha.
We will be offering a demo/free trial of FeedLounge so that you can test it out before you sign up. However, to make sure that the demo system is as responsive as the production system, this demo will be gated due to the high server load associated with initial account set-up (importing OPML and new feed subscriptions). The details of this have not been fully finalized yet, and will likely be announced on Monday the 16th.
For our initial beta launch, we will be accepting payments exclusively through PayPal. If you have a PayPal account, you can sign up for a monthly or annual subscription (as priced above). If you do not have a PayPal account and do not want to create one, you can purchase one year of service (priced the same as the annual subscription) with a credit card through PayPal, without creating a PayPal account. The monthly subscription is only available through a PayPal account at this time.
We understand that some people prefer not to use PayPal for various reasons, and we’ll be adding additional payment methods as we move forward. We are primarily focused on building great features into FeedLounge right now, and using a single payment processing system helps us keep that focus.
Information about pricing and payments is now posted in a the FAQ list as well.
