Posts in: General

I was able to cancel everyone’s subscription today with the help of Paypal support, and after their downtime this morning…

I refunded all monthly subscribers the payment for the month of may, and refunded as many yearly subscribers as I could track down. If you are still missing a refund, it means PayPal won’t let me refund anymore. Just forward (to scott at stonecobra daht com) me the Paypal transaction number, or at a minimum your paypal email address and I will process the refund promptly.

All,

FeedLounge the subscription service will be shutting down this weekend. I am still working on a deal with another party to take FeedLounge free, and things are looking up. The new FeedLounge would be on a different backend however, and will also take some time to develop, so the existing service needs to come offline anyway.

Please export your feeds/flags/tags, and we hope to see you again in the near future, without that pesky pay barrier that most people hated.

More updates as they come…

All,

I have serious offers in right now to take FeedLounge free to the public. If the deal succeeds, FeedLounge would convert to a free service after some transition period. I will still allow all existing users to cancel their subscriptions as of June 1st, and then just re-activate them as free subscribers should the deal move forward. There would also be more serious backing that just one person can provide, so I think that would be welcomed by the user community.

All,

Due to some overwhelming personal/family issues, it is with regret that I announce the closure of FeedLounge as of June 1st, 2007. I have been trying to develop new features and support FeedLounge in my spare time, but the toll of a new child, and a job, and now a serious injury in the family requires all of the rest of my attention. Something had to give.

All annual subscribers that are currently active will be fully refunded their pro-rated subscription after they have cancelled with PayPal. I am in contact with PayPal to attempt a mass-cancellation, but it seems that is not possible, at least with the support people I have talked with. If anyone has pointers, feel free to comment here and let me know. I will at a minimum remove the PayPal notification backchannel on June 1st.

If anyone is interested in buying and taking over FeedLounge, please contact me and we can discuss. We have also developed a FeedLounge V2 UI that is backend agnostic, using all the latest bells and whistles (YUI-ext, client side caching, etc).

This post is a prelude to a series of posts that will outline the new and exciting plans that FeedLoungers are hatching. FeedLounge is alive and moving forward faster than before. We are currently putting the finishing touches on a list of new features and the plan to get them released to the public. We are also working on a widespread communication plan to get the word out about FeedLounge. FeedLounge continues to strive for innovation and openness with unparalleled excellence; we welcome your input along this new leg of the journey.

FeedLounge has recently undergone some personnel changes. Alex has left FeedLounge, and we wish him the best in his future endeavors. Kris joined FeedLounge as a Performance Architect and is working on some backend changes that will deliver screaming results. Matt joined FeedLounge as a Senior Developer working to deliver new high quality features that will keep FeedLoungers coming back for more. Amanda joined the team with the mission to evangelize and design the future of FeedLounge. We’ll post profiles and ideas from each of our new FeedLoungers in the upcoming weeks.

All-in-all there are exciting changes happening at FeedLounge. Stay tuned for more information.

1 week ago I sold my share of FeedLounge to Scott. We delayed the announcement until today because I was out of town until last night.

I’d like to thank Scott for all the great work he’s done to make our vision for FeedLounge come to life. Scott will continue to run the service and I’m sure he will do a great job with it.

I’d also like to thank everyone who has used, supported and provided feedback about FeedLounge. FeedLounge has been an amazing experience for me and I’d like to thank you for what I’ve learned from each of you.

I’ve posted some more personal thoughts (including reasons for leaving) on my blog. Please leave any comments you may have on that post rather than this one.

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.