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.

• Allow clicking on items to select in all browsers (in River). (forum thread)
• Fixed extra space in item header when using back/forward nav.
• Tags are no longer duplicated in the feed list. (forum thread)
• Editing feed information properly saves the changes made (including tagging). (forum thread, forum thread, forum thread)
• All caches are cleared properly so that it doesn’t appear that we retain old data about items (forum thread)

• Re-adding a previously subscribed feed now adds the subscription to the user interface correctly. (forum thread, forum thread)
• Fix a typo in the unsubscribe message. (forum thread)
• Reduce the overall HTML footprint of the FeedLounge pages by removing some old cruft.
• OPML export almost validates now.

I’ve put in a little proof of concept feature for testing and feedback: the ability to listen to podcasts/mp3s attached to items. Right now, this is only available in non-IE browsers and embeds the audio in the item when you click the “play” button for the enclosure. It may be a better choice to bring up a persistent media player area in the UI (or a popup player) so that you don’t have to stay on an item while listening to a podcast.

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.

• When changing views, remember the status of the currently displayed items. (forum thread)

• Fix “Mark All Read” button styling in IE. (forum thread, forum thread)

• When resizing panes and making them very narrow, buttons now lose their labels before they disappear. (forum thread)
• When changing layouts, no need to re-fetch items from the server. (forum thread)
• Only show one link per enclosure, and include filename. (forum thread)
• The system error template contains more information. (forum thread)
• The loading page has an explanation for its purpose.
• More watchdog code to see when feed refreshing slows down or falls behind. (forum thread)

• The “this item has been updated” banner is now shown at the top of the item and styled to be more noticable. (forum thread, forum thread)
• When you change the hide/show read items drop down, focus is returned to the page so you can use keyboard navigation as normal. (forum thread)

• Feed items are properly sorted in time order outside a feed tag (forum thread)
• Counting is back in sync properly. (forum thread, forum thread)
• Queue is now fully caught up after conversion and a coding error (forum thread)
• History is propery sorted by read time rather than item time (was accidentally broken again in the data conversion).

• Resize pane sliders don’t show through pop-up dialogs. (forum thread)