1. IE7 Support - Turns out that IE7 wasn’t supporting the way we were determining the client height, so we updated FeedLounge to use document.documentElement.clientHeight for IE7 user agents. IE7 and FeedLounge are now a go.
2. Flagged Items Export - Simply turn on the preference to publish your feeds to the public, and hit this URL: http://api.feedlounge.com/USERNAME/flagged. Don’t forget to use your own userid in place of USERNAME in the URL.

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.

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]

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]

I started playing with this idea because several folks asked me about it at MashupCamp last week. I’ve generally opened the MP3 file in a new tab when I want to listen to a podcast for an item, but the folks I spoke with were very excited about the idea of having this built in to a web based reader.

I’m curious to hear your feedback. If it’s popular, we’ll look at doing a proper implementation for a future release.

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.

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]

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!