Posts in: February, 2006

I’ve put in a little proof of concept feature for testing and feedback: the ability to listen to podcasts/mp3s attached to items. Right now, this is only available in non-IE browsers and embeds the audio in the item when you click the “play” button for the enclosure. It may be a better choice to bring up a persistent media player area in the UI (or a popup player) so that you don’t have to stay on an item while listening to a podcast.

I started playing with this idea because several folks asked me about it at MashupCamp last week. I’ve generally opened the MP3 file in a new tab when I want to listen to a podcast for an item, but the folks I spoke with were very excited about the idea of having this built in to a web based reader.

I’m curious to hear your feedback. If it’s popular, we’ll look at doing a proper implementation for a future release.

• When changing views, remember the status of the currently displayed items. (forum thread)

• Fix “Mark All Read” button styling in IE. (forum thread, forum thread)

• When resizing panes and making them very narrow, buttons now lose their labels before they disappear. (forum thread)
• When changing layouts, no need to re-fetch items from the server. (forum thread)
• Only show one link per enclosure, and include filename. (forum thread)
• The system error template contains more information. (forum thread)
• The loading page has an explanation for its purpose.
• More watchdog code to see when feed refreshing slows down or falls behind. (forum thread)

• The “this item has been updated” banner is now shown at the top of the item and styled to be more noticable. (forum thread, forum thread)
• When you change the hide/show read items drop down, focus is returned to the page so you can use keyboard navigation as normal. (forum thread)

• Feed items are properly sorted in time order outside a feed tag (forum thread)
• Counting is back in sync properly. (forum thread, forum thread)
• Queue is now fully caught up after conversion and a coding error (forum thread)
• History is propery sorted by read time rather than item time (was accidentally broken again in the data conversion).

• Resize pane sliders don’t show through pop-up dialogs. (forum thread)

• Item push works properly if you’re reading from the Unread Items feed. (forum thread)
• Items are sorted properly in the items list. (forum thread)
• More error handling for funky data in OPML imports - user should never be locked out. (forum thread)

The “Eirik” release has the most significant changes to FeedLounge since our public release.

• Speed! This is really been a problem for the last couple weeks (it’s been the #1 voted feature); we decided to make some dramatic changes to the FeedLounge back end to solve it. There are still a few optimizations we have planned as we move forward, but the changes in this release should be very noticable.
• The first Opera specific code has been added as we start moving towards official Opera support.
• Marking items as updated as well as unread when they are changed.
• A full logging system for feed updates so that we can know exactly what is going on when people ask us why a certain feed hasn’t been updated.
• 14 days of History are now available on the History page.
• The number of new items is shown briefly in the status area after new items are pushed to you.

We knew that as we gained more subscribers we’d have to make changes to the back-end system, but we underestimated our users. At the moment, for each FeedLounge user, we are subscribed to 70 unique feeds¹. For comparison, the stats other services publish show 8-10 feeds/per user. We set out to build a more powerful web based feed reader, and it looks like we succeeded. As we continue to gain more subscribers in the future, I’m sure the number of feeds per user (not the number of subscriptions) will come down a little.

Anyways, the point is that it turned out we needed the back-end enhancements before we expected, so performance has dragged recently as a result until we could get the changes made. We’ve been taking it in the teeth in the blogosphere with regards to performance, and rightly so. Hopefully these reviews will start going in the other direction now.

We’ve also purchased and installed 5 new servers² in our rack space. With the changes in the Eirik release, we now have even more servers sharing the load.

The transition to the new back end system in the Eirik release required some downtime (a lot more than we expected, to be honest) while we made the transition. Downtime is never well received, no matter what the reason is. In our first month of service we had unscheduled downtime only twice (and scheduled maintenence only once). Talking with a number of folks that work in the hosted service industry, I know that this is pretty darn good for the first month of a new service. With the new changes in this release, we hope to improve on that going forward.

Major changes also bring the possibility of new bugs. We’ve done a good bit of testing, but if anything seems out of whack, please let us know in the forums.

Eirik Stavem gets the honor for this release. Eirik was a great alpha tester and has continued providing both excellent feedback and help to others in the forums, and has submitted some of the best and most complete bug reports we’ve received. Thanks Eirik, we really appreciate it!

1. Some users have well over a thousand feeds! [back]
2. Pretty beefy ones too. [back]

You can now click on the Unread Items special feed to refresh the unread items. (forum thread)