The “Matt Walters” Release

We are very pleased to announce the “Matt Walters” release of FeedLounge. This releases introduces the first FeedLounge APIs.

We’ve had OPML export in FeedLounge for a long time, but now we’ve added the ability for users to publish their reading list from a new API tab in the Settings window. If you choose to do so, your reading list (including your tags) can be made public as:

• OPML
• RSS
• HTML

Pretty cool, right? But wait, that’s not all!

We’ve also added an API for a FeedLounge notifier! This doesn’t just return the number of unread items, it also gives you the number of unread items in each tag. This way, notifier developers can add the kinds of smart features our users are asking for.

We’ve had a number of folks volunteer to create notifiers¹ for FeedLounge, and we are happy we can now take them up on their offers. We just might consider giving a little reward to folks that create really great notifiers as well. What will it be? Build one and find out!

We’ve introduced an API token for each user as part of the API feature set. The notifier API supports this token, so notifier developers can ask for either the user’s API token (highly recommended) or for their username and password and use 401 authentication.

There is now an API section on our Support page to cover the new APIs and how to use them.

These are the first APIs we’re making available, not the last. We’ve got some others in the pipeline that we’re excited about and look forward to making public.

We are honoring Matt Walters with this release. Matt is the first non-alpha user we’ve honored in our release naming. He signed up on the first day FeedLounge became publicly available, and has been a wonderful source of ideas and help for other users in the forums. Matt is also the one who added the “notifier” feature to the voting list - glad we’ve got that in for you now Matt, and thanks for your continued contributions.

1. You know, a little app that runs in your menu bar/system tray and tells you how many new items you have. [back]