Posts in: March, 2006

In the “SOG” release, we are introducing the first features that allow FeedLounge to work with other services.

We’ve introduced TagThru™ in this release. TagThru™ takes any item tags you add in FeedLounge and also adds them to your account in a tagging/bookmarking service. In talking with a number of users about this feature, we believe that being able to use the smooth integration of tagging in the FeedLounge interface with the ability for you to also have these tags in your primary tagging/bookmarking service.

The first implementation of TagThru™ is an integration with del.icio.us. If you have a del.icio.us account, you can activate TagThru™ in FeedLounge and whenever you tag an item in FeedLounge, we’ll also add that tag to your del.icio.us account¹.

We plan to add support to other services like furl, Ma.gnolia, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo! MyWeb, etc. in the future. At the moment these services don’t have APIs for us to use, though most of them have announced that they have an API is planned.

As they create their API’s, we strongly encourage these services to have an API that simply allows the adding of a tag/label to an URL with a single API call. For our del.icio.us TagThru™ implementation, we have to first ask for any tags for the item, do our own merge, then update the item. We do this to make sure we don’t stomp any existing tags you may have given the item in del.icio.us prior to tagging the item in FeedLounge. Sure it’s an edge case, but folks generally aren’t very happy when they lose data.

We’ve also added the ability to sort items “oldest first”. Our users told us that this was important to them on the Voting Page (it was #3 on the list today), we’re glad to be able to deliver it to them. One more dot on the TechCrunch chart for FeedLounge.

In addition to the new features, we’ve also expanded our 50 person, 3 Hour Tour to a 500 person, 24 Hour Tour (restarting at midnight PST). Now you can take FeedLounge for a spin for a full day, so you can really get the full FeedLounge experience.

Stephen O’Grady is honored with this release. Steve has been with us since our early alpha days and has generously provided invaluable feedback to us in a number of areas. Thanks Steve, hope you like being able to tag things in del.icio.us right from within FeedLounge!

1. The call to tag in del.icio.us is placed in the Queue, so the tag may be slightly delayed in appearing in del.icio.us depending on the size of the Queue. [back]

TechCrunch’s comparison of web-based feed readers includes a feature chart that has been copied and included in a number of posts - unfortunately, many of these posts grabbed the original version of the chart which missed a couple of features we have here at FeedLounge.

• Export Reading Lists (OPML) - FeedLounge has supported OPML export since July 2005.¹
• Shortcut Keys - FeedLounge has been built with extensive shortcut keys, including support for arrow keys and the spacebar. There is an FAQ with a full list.

I wanted to mention these here since some folks will be seeing incorrect information on the sites that had copied the original version of the chart. We may be able to add a few more dots to our column soon as well.

Thanks to Frank for including us in his review and for updating the chart on TechCrunch.

1. And our customers notice. [back]

• Ebay search feeds now work correctly (spaces in the search string). (forum thread)

Since FeedLounge is a bootstrapped operation, we wanted to make sure we could deliver what we promised. This meant being conservative to start, in several areas. One of these was our feed refresh schedule.

Though we are already trying a faster schedule, we are also trying to think of other ways to be bandwidth friendly, yet attempt to provide the best possible service to our users. Oh, the conflict. One option we’re looking at is to reward content that is naturally bandwidth friendly.

If a feed serves up 304 Not Modified HTTP response when there is nothing new (saving bandwidth on both ends and processing time for FeedLounge), FeedLounge could reward the subscribers of that feed by updating that feed more often.

Some examples:

• Let’s assume that this theoretical feed is about 20KB, and FeedLounge has decided to update it every 8 hours. In any given day, this feed may max out at about 62KB of bandwidth if it changed every time FeedLounge checked. If the feed does not respond with a 304, then FeedLounge has spent (wasted, really) 62KB of bandwidth for nothing. If the feed does report a 304, then the bandwidth per check is only ~1K.
• Assuming that a non-changing feed reports a 304 when asked by FeedLounge for content, we then have some room to spend bandwidth and gain faster content refreshes. In this latter example, let’s say that FeedLounge updated the schedule to check every 30 minutes. We are now talking about 50K per day in bandwidth, assuming no changes, and only 70KB if the feed changed once per day.

The result is that we could well be refreshing about ~60% of our feeds every 30 minutes. This is something we’ll likely be testing over the next couple of weeks - any initial thoughts?

We’ve taken the 3 Hour Tour down briefly while we do some upgrades, thanks for your patience.

Update (Thu 12:45 AM PST): The tour is now back up on the latest and greatest. Thanks for your patience.

• Subscribing to a feed no longer gives old items (forum thread)

• Deleting feeds is now deleting feeds on the back end as well as the UI. ( forum thread, forum thread, forum thread, forum thread)
• Feed tag editing is now working on feeds with existing tags. (forum thread)

We’ve been testing a dramatically faster feed refresh schedule - anyone noticing a difference?

When we upgraded the version of WordPress that is running feedlounge.com, all of our feeds were broken due to incompatibilities in the new rewrite rule handling in WP 2.0. I think I’ve got them all fixed again, but let me know if anything doesn’t seem right.

Thanks to Matt for letting me know that the feeds were broken.

• Additional query string information is removed from enclosure filenames.
• Marking an item unread properly updates the unread count for the feed/tag. (forum thread)
• Fixed a Safari specific issue that affected editing feeds in some situations.
• More invalid character fixes to keep Postel happy. (forum thread, forum thread).
• OPML export works faster. (forum thread)