Posts in: General

Since FeedLounge is a bootstrapped operation, we wanted to make sure we could deliver what we promised. This meant being conservative to start, in several areas. One of these was our feed refresh schedule.

Though we are already trying a faster schedule, we are also trying to think of other ways to be bandwidth friendly, yet attempt to provide the best possible service to our users. Oh, the conflict. One option we’re looking at is to reward content that is naturally bandwidth friendly.

If a feed serves up 304 Not Modified HTTP response when there is nothing new (saving bandwidth on both ends and processing time for FeedLounge), FeedLounge could reward the subscribers of that feed by updating that feed more often.

Some examples:

• Let’s assume that this theoretical feed is about 20KB, and FeedLounge has decided to update it every 8 hours. In any given day, this feed may max out at about 62KB of bandwidth if it changed every time FeedLounge checked. If the feed does not respond with a 304, then FeedLounge has spent (wasted, really) 62KB of bandwidth for nothing. If the feed does report a 304, then the bandwidth per check is only ~1K.
• Assuming that a non-changing feed reports a 304 when asked by FeedLounge for content, we then have some room to spend bandwidth and gain faster content refreshes. In this latter example, let’s say that FeedLounge updated the schedule to check every 30 minutes. We are now talking about 50K per day in bandwidth, assuming no changes, and only 70KB if the feed changed once per day.

The result is that we could well be refreshing about ~60% of our feeds every 30 minutes. This is something we’ll likely be testing over the next couple of weeks - any initial thoughts?

We’ve taken the 3 Hour Tour down briefly while we do some upgrades, thanks for your patience.

Update (Thu 12:45 AM PST): The tour is now back up on the latest and greatest. Thanks for your patience.

We’ve been testing a dramatically faster feed refresh schedule - anyone noticing a difference?

When we upgraded the version of WordPress that is running feedlounge.com, all of our feeds were broken due to incompatibilities in the new rewrite rule handling in WP 2.0. I think I’ve got them all fixed again, but let me know if anything doesn’t seem right.

Thanks to Matt for letting me know that the feeds were broken.

The FeedLounge web site (feedlounge.com) experienced a network outage today which affected the website and the forums. While the web site and forums were down, my.feedlounge.com was not affected.

We have not received word yet, but we believe the entire network of the hosting company went down, as their website was also unreachable, and calls to their support number were constantly busy.

All seems to be up and working again.

The “Eirik” release has the most significant changes to FeedLounge since our public release.

• Speed! This is really been a problem for the last couple weeks (it’s been the #1 voted feature); we decided to make some dramatic changes to the FeedLounge back end to solve it. There are still a few optimizations we have planned as we move forward, but the changes in this release should be very noticable.
• The first Opera specific code has been added as we start moving towards official Opera support.
• Marking items as updated as well as unread when they are changed.
• A full logging system for feed updates so that we can know exactly what is going on when people ask us why a certain feed hasn’t been updated.
• 14 days of History are now available on the History page.
• The number of new items is shown briefly in the status area after new items are pushed to you.

We knew that as we gained more subscribers we’d have to make changes to the back-end system, but we underestimated our users. At the moment, for each FeedLounge user, we are subscribed to 70 unique feeds¹. For comparison, the stats other services publish show 8-10 feeds/per user. We set out to build a more powerful web based feed reader, and it looks like we succeeded. As we continue to gain more subscribers in the future, I’m sure the number of feeds per user (not the number of subscriptions) will come down a little.

Anyways, the point is that it turned out we needed the back-end enhancements before we expected, so performance has dragged recently as a result until we could get the changes made. We’ve been taking it in the teeth in the blogosphere with regards to performance, and rightly so. Hopefully these reviews will start going in the other direction now.

We’ve also purchased and installed 5 new servers² in our rack space. With the changes in the Eirik release, we now have even more servers sharing the load.

The transition to the new back end system in the Eirik release required some downtime (a lot more than we expected, to be honest) while we made the transition. Downtime is never well received, no matter what the reason is. In our first month of service we had unscheduled downtime only twice (and scheduled maintenence only once). Talking with a number of folks that work in the hosted service industry, I know that this is pretty darn good for the first month of a new service. With the new changes in this release, we hope to improve on that going forward.

Major changes also bring the possibility of new bugs. We’ve done a good bit of testing, but if anything seems out of whack, please let us know in the forums.

Eirik Stavem gets the honor for this release. Eirik was a great alpha tester and has continued providing both excellent feedback and help to others in the forums, and has submitted some of the best and most complete bug reports we’ve received. Thanks Eirik, we really appreciate it!

1. Some users have well over a thousand feeds! [back]
2. Pretty beefy ones too. [back]

I think we’ve gotten a pretty good reputation for being responsive to feature requests from our users since our public release. However, there was also a case in the forums where we were forced to reply that the requested feature was probably not going to make it to the top of our list for a while. I don’t think the requesting user liked this much, and I can understand that feeling - it’s not fun when you feel like you aren’t in control. Luckily, we can fix that!

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]

The “gfmorris” release is now live! We’ve been working hard on this one for a little while and we’ve done our best to address the issues most frequently raised by our users.

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!

We have been working hard on the backend to improve the performance of FeedLounge. We know performance is important to you, so keep watching this space to see more updates.

• System maintenance was a success. We mopped up a few spills, solidified a few more services, tweaked a few database server parameters, etc.
• Performance update: Logging of feed update activity is now done to MogileFS, offloading from the database. More changes to include MogileFS in the future where appropriate.
• Performance update: All preferences are now handled by a custom preference server, using Twisted and a BerkeleyDB backend, further offloading the database.
• More invalid character fixes.
• memcached is installed and running, with a small portion of the application in test. More caching updates to come as well.

Note: Loading items by feed tag is particularly slow, and we are profiling the application to find where the bottlenecks lie. Please be patient, and if you can, read items per feed for the interim. Just press the = key to expand/collapse a tag. If a tag is expanded, space bar navigation will move to each feed inside the tag.

We’re getting some nice responses to FeedLounge already:

Stephen O’Grady:

now’s your chance to sign up for what I consider the best feed reading experience available.

DeWitt Clinton:

I had the pleasure of participating in their alpha program and think they have tremendous potential. That and they are simply very nice guys and I love the way they have communicated about building the product.

John Tokash:

The UI is more pleasant, professional and powerful than the other web based aggregators. Serious AJAX going on here.

Scott Jarkoff:

Does the service live up to the “hype” that has been growing since the announcement? While there are still some quirks to be ironed out, overall the service is exceptional.

Matt Tancock:

Bloglines is dead! Long live Feedlounge!

Chris Hubbs:

FeedLounge has an amazing user interface, good enough that though it’s just a web page, it tempts you to think that you’re running a separate application.

Andrew West:

I’ve been an alpha tester on the FeedLounge web-based RSS feed reader for six months or so, and I’m very impressed with it. It’s the only online service I’ve seen that handles my ~200 feeds without slowing down or just making a mess.

Justin Merz:

First and foremost you must remind yourself that this is not a desktop application. Which is hard to do with the amazing UI that feedlounge implements.

P.F. Flyer:

I admit I was skeptical while waiting for the public release. When it was finally released last week, I wasn’t incredibly impressed. It looked pretty much like any other RSS Reader. However, it took a day of playing around with it to truly begin to understand how different it was from the rest of the crowd.

Brainpipe:

And the highest praise of all: Finally, an online RSS reader that Just Works™.

Dougal Campbell:

This is one of the few web-based applications that I’d ever consider paying for.

It’s great to see this kind of response!

Of course, not all of the feedback has been positive. Some people strongly dislike the monthly fee¹, others have run into problems (many of which have been fixed). As Geof discusses, we’ve been very transparent about everything we’re doing here with FeedLounge² and we’ll keep working to make FeedLounge the best feed reading experience out there.

1. More on this in a future post. [back]
2. I’ve been tagging all FeedLounge mentions I see on del.icio.us [back]