The “gfmorris” Release

The “gfmorris” release is now live! We’ve been working hard on this one for a little while and we’ve done our best to address the issues most frequently raised by our users.

Changes in this release:

• An option to not mark updated items as unread. We’ve actually implemented this as both a user preference (default setting for all your feeds) and as a per feed preference - allowing you to override your user preference for any specific feeds you want to. Based on the many, many requests for this ability, we have set the global default for each user to not mark updated items as unread. You can change this in your Settings, and you can set this for each feed in the Info for the feed. (forum thread, forum thread, forum thread, forum thread)
• An option to hide read items. I think this may be something people want to change fairly regularly (where is that item I read the other day from this feed…), so we’ve added this as a drop-down option in the main toolbar. (forum thread)
• An option for how long to keep items once they’ve been read. This defaults to 60 days, but the lower you set it, the better performance you will get (until we roll out a few more scalability enhancements).
• Items on the Tags and History screens now link directly to the original item. We will bring back the ability to go to the item within FeedLounge in the future, but this is a stop-gap measure to make sure you can get to the original item easily. (forum thread, forum thread)
• We now use memcached to reduce the load on the database during feed parsing.
• Better handling of etags and last-modified for 304 support.
• FeedLounge now handles HTTP status code 410, recommending unsubscribing from the feed (in the Feed Info errors list).

We’ve decided to name our releases after our users rather than using a standard numbering scheme. Since the service is hosted - having version numbers isn’t that important. Instead, we’ve chosen to honor an individual user with each release for their contributions, suggestions and the general betterment of the FeedLounge community. The distinction of the first such release goes to one of our first alpha users: Geof Morris.

Geof has been providing us with great feedback since our initial alpha release (including being among the first to request some of the features in this release), and we are quite appreciative. Thanks Geof!