Posts in: Features

You can now open the currently selected item in a new window by pressing the ‘q’ key. The documentation has been updated accordingly.

In the 3 pane view, the “Category” column is now replaced with “Feed Name” when viewing items by feed tag. When viewing items by feed, the column shows the item category as it did previously.

This was requested in the forums.

We’re now live on alpha 8!

Notable changes since alpha 7:

• Collapsible Item Tags Form - some folks wanted to be able to get it out of the way, now you can.
• Read and Flag Buttons in “River” View - the keyboard shortcuts were the only way to set these on items while in the “river of news” view previously.
• Lightweight Bookmarklet Subscribe - when subscribing to a feed through the bookmarklet (which has an updated URL now), the subscription is added to the queue for processing and you are shown a confirmation message (instead of loading the entire FeedLounge interface).
• OPML Import Counter - shows how many feeds are remaining from your import, but doesn’t maintain this during a page reload (yet).
• Duplicated Content Fix - an update to the feedparser took care of this.
• Item tags in Safari - can be removed as expected.
• History Screen Fix - a minor MySQL to PostgreSQL conversion issue was fixed, unread items aren’t shown anymore.
• Broken Subscriptions - are shown properly as broken instead of “Untitled” in the feeds list
• Gmail Feeds Work - fixed an SSL timeout issue.

Monday is coming fast, so please let us know in the forums about anything that doesn’t look just right.

We’ve updated FeedLounge to alpha 7. This includes some pretty hefty changes:

• Item Push - new items are now pushed to your browser (like Gmail). This means that counts should stay in sync properly as well. Y’all are going to love this feature!
• Preference to open links in new windows - we sincerely apologize to all our alpha users, we didn’t realize that holding down an extra key to open a link in a new tab/window (like you do everywhere else on the web) was such a hardship. We have learned from our mistake and deeply regret the hardship we have inflicted on our alpha users all these months.
• New Feed Subscribe Icon - making it easier to subscribe to feeds is important. (Alex blogged about the icon this week)
• 25 Items per page - the number of items per page has been reduced from 50 to 25. Browsers seem to handle this amount of content at once a whole lot better.
• Feed Tag Paging Behavior - when a feed tag is selected, the items are now returned in date order instead of all new item first (in date order). This (and item push) make the paging more consistent.
• Queue Performance and Stability - the Queue got a big time overhaul and is both faster and much more stable. It’s now not only multi-threaded, but distributed over several machines.
• Comment Feed Subscriptions - If you’ve subscribed to a comment feed for an item, that is indicated when viewing the item (the link to subscribe isn’t shown).
• Bug fixes - a number of bug fixes, including many Safari specific fixes.

Along with the new features, I’m sure we’ve created some new and interesting bugs - we look forward to reports from our alpha testers in the forums.

FeedLounge has reached alpha 6!

As planned, this release is smaller in scale than the previous alpha releases. There are three main features added in this version:

1. Browser Compatibility - FeedLounge now works on IE 6 and Safari, as well as gecko browsers. All alpha users are encouraged to use FeedLounge in IE and Safari for bug hunting. This completes the stated browser compatibility goals we have for our beta release. We will explore supporting additional browsers in the future, but likely after our beta release.
2. Removal of Explicit Save - Items are now saved through tagging, not through clicking the ’save’ icon for each item. This is how our alpha users assumed it worked anyway.
3. Bug Fixes - in particular, we cleaned up some keyboard navigation issues in the “river of news” view and the Tags and History screens properly show items again.

Please let us know in the forums about anything that doesn’t seem right.

Finally! We’re live with our alpha 5 release.

Some new features of note:

• A “River of News” view
• Atom 1.0 support
• Auto-discovery of feeds (can enter http://feedlounge.com/blog/ instead of http://feedlounge.com/blog/feed/)
• Revamped tagging interface for easier addition and removal of tags
• Revamped item header display (includes author information if available)
• Enclosures are shown as download links in the item content area
• Links to subscribe to comment feeds for items that offer them
• Creation of the feeds list on the server - speeds up initial load
• A new read/unread icon
• Ability to edit feed tags
• Ability to delete tags in the feeds list
• Ability to set the color of a tag
• Back end optimizations
• The page title now prepends “Loading…” when busy, so you can be in another tab and see when it is done loading

Also, I really need to update the screenshots here at some point.

I guess I should add Google Blog Search to the available search feeds in FeedLounge for the next release.

FeedLounge is now running on our Alpha 4 release. This release fixes a few bugs, but the mainly this release is about adding new features:

• 401 Authentication Support - you can now subscribe to your password protected feeds in FeedLounge.
• Private Feeds - if you mark a feed private, tags you apply to that feed and items from that feed will remain private. Note: all 401 authenticated feeds are automatically marked “private”.
• History Page - a simple interface for browsing items you’ve read in the last week by date.
• Tag and Search Subscriptions - we’ve added an easy interface (3rd tab in the Add window) for adding tag subscriptions from del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati; and search subscriptions from DayPop, Feedster and Yahoo News.

Enjoy the new features and if you run into anything unexpected, let us know in the forums.

Right now we use AJAX to store each user’s preferences (current feed/tag/item, which tags are open in the feeds list, etc.) on the server, maintaining a single consistent experience across any browsers and computers someone is using. There are a lot of benefits to this, it’s often great to be able to pick up right where you left off.

However, we’ve also considered taking a different route: storing preferences (for things liks open/closed feed tags, selected item, etc.) in a browser cookie. This would allow you to have a “work” profile and a “home” profile of sorts.

How do you read? Which would you prefer? We want your feedback…

One of the things I enjoy with FeedLounge is the way you can go from one computer to another, log in, and be right where you were. This is one of the cool things about using AJAX extensively in a web application. We can keep track of changes as they happen so your user experience is pretty much seemless between sessions, browsers, machines, etc.