Posts in: July, 2006

As feared, we’re going to have to drop the current (corrupt) cache data to fix the problems folks are seeing. As a result FeedLounge performance will suffer until the cache repopulates - likely through the weekend. We are dropping the cache now.

We’ve put a patch in place to avoid the cached data that has shown itself to be problematic in our debugging. This should resolve the “funny” behavior we’ve been seeing today, if you’re still seeing problems please let us know in the forums.

UPDATE: *sigh* - seems like this fix doesn’t work for a lot of folks, we’re still on it.

This morning I discovered that the web server for the ‘Lounge (my.feedlounge.com) had gone down and not restarted properly. This is the first time this has happened since January, and the hits have just kept on coming all day long.

As soon as the ‘Lounge was brought back online, we started getting reports FeedLounge acting “funny”: feed items not loading properly, non-matching unread counts for feeds and strangeness with the items returned for some feeds (read/unread status being off, etc.).

After a day of debugging, Scott traced the problem to (what looks like) corrupt memcached data.

The good news (if you can call it that) is that the “real” data in the databases seems to be fine - it’s only the cached data that is out of whack.

We’re trying to find a way to fix this without requiring a clearing of the cached data, because if we have to clear the cache performance will suffer for a few days while the cache repopulates.

More news as we have it.

We are very pleased to announce the “Avi Flax” release of FeedLounge.

This release adds two major features:

1. Mark Page Read - Many people have asked for this, we’re happy to make it available. There is now a small drop down arrow next to the “Mark All Read” button, when you click this you can choose to have either a Mark All Read button or a Mark Page Read button.
2. “Big Red Button” - from time to time people want to be able to completely reset their account, deleting all their feeds and tags. We’ve now given each user the ability to do this (though we’ve also added several layers of “are you sure”s to make sure no one does it by mistake).

We’ve also fixed a few bugs:

• When “paging” to a page that no longer exists due to hidden read items, the feed properly shows the last available page. (forum thread)
• After adding an authenticated feed, the Private checkbox is properly available when adding additional feeds. (forum thread)

And we’re continuing to do lots of behind the scenes work on the back-end systems so that we can continue to meet the needs of our customers as we grow.

We are honoring Avi Flax with this release. Avi has been an active member of the FeedLounge community, providing great feedback for us in the forums and helping spread the word about FeedLounge.