Posts in: February, 2006

• The task server controlling feed downloads is now retrying failed feeds properly. (forum thread)

• External links in item lists respect the “open external links in new windows” pref properly. (forum thread)

• When hiding read items, handle case where there is no longer a “page 2″, etc. (forum thread)

• Resizeable panes handle “out of bounds” values properly. (forum thread)
• Items on History screen are properly sorted by the time they were read. (forum thread)
• The count of items by tag (Tags screen) and by date (History screen) includes items on all pages. (forum thread)

You can now resize all of the panes in the FeedLounge interface. This was only in the middle of the feature voting list, but it had been started a while back so I wanted to finish it up.

This was requested in the forums a long time ago.

Note: This did not happen at the expense of the scalability and performance coding that is going on right now. Scott is 100% on the back-end changes that will bring performance back where it should be (he says it’s coming along - thanks for your patience). He’s the back-end guy, I’m the front-end guy. For a brief moment we considered not releasing this feature until the performance changes were ready, but then we realized we’ve got smart users who can understand this stuff.

UPDATE: The 3 Hour Tour is still running on a pre-gfmorris version of FeedLounge. Once we get the performance fixes in, we’ll update the Tour to the latest codeline, including this feature.

• External subscribe URL used by Feed Your Reader works properly. (forum thread)
• Pushed unread counts should be much more consistent now. (forum thread, forum thread)
• Script to delete items based on setting added in the gfmorris release is live and running nightly.
• New users no longer have their prefs reset on login. (forum thread)

I think we’ve gotten a pretty good reputation for being responsive to feature requests from our users since our public release. However, there was also a case in the forums where we were forced to reply that the requested feature was probably not going to make it to the top of our list for a while. I don’t think the requesting user liked this much, and I can understand that feeling - it’s not fun when you feel like you aren’t in control. Luckily, we can fix that!

We now have a system up and running to allow you to submit and vote on features!

The voting system is integrated with the forum login, so you don’t even have to be a FeedLounge user to tell us what you’d like to see. Just make sure you’re logged in to the forums, then you can add your favorite feature to the list or vote for it if it’s already there. You can even link the feature to a discussion thread in the forums (highly recommended)¹.

Each person gets 3 votes: a “first”, “second” and “third” place vote, and you can change your votes at any time.

We can’t promise that we’ll always implement features in exactly the order they appear on the list, but we can promise that we will pay close attention to the input given there - just as we do to the feedback we receive in the forums.

Right now we are focused on improving performance and fixing a few pesky bugs with unread counts, so now is a great time to get your favorite feature up on the list!

A few changes that will be coming on the voting system soon:

• The ability to add links to forum discussions after the feature is already on the list.
• Showing a list of the users that have voted for each feature.
• Live updates of score totals/rankings.

It’s not 100% done yet, but we wanted to get it live - the refinements will happen as we move forward.

1. We’ll be adding the ability to add multiple links for each feature in the future. [back]

• New item tags are shown properly in IE. (forum thread)
• https:// links open in a new window too. (forum thread)
• Up arrow in River of News scrolls to the top of an item if the item is more than 1 screen tall. (forum thread)
• Item tags box properly remembers your choice to hide/show. (forum thread)
• Removing item tags removes them from both browser cache and from the back-end data.

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!