• Item push works properly if you’re reading from the Unread Items feed. (forum thread)
• Items are sorted properly in the items list. (forum thread)
• More error handling for funky data in OPML imports - user should never be locked out. (forum thread)

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]

You can now click on the Unread Items special feed to refresh the unread items. (forum thread)

• The task server controlling feed downloads is now retrying failed feeds properly. (forum thread)

• External links in item lists respect the “open external links in new windows” pref properly. (forum thread)

• When hiding read items, handle case where there is no longer a “page 2″, etc. (forum thread)

• Resizeable panes handle “out of bounds” values properly. (forum thread)
• Items on History screen are properly sorted by the time they were read. (forum thread)
• The count of items by tag (Tags screen) and by date (History screen) includes items on all pages. (forum thread)

You can now resize all of the panes in the FeedLounge interface. This was only in the middle of the feature voting list, but it had been started a while back so I wanted to finish it up.

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.

• External subscribe URL used by Feed Your Reader works properly. (forum thread)
• Pushed unread counts should be much more consistent now. (forum thread, forum thread)
• Script to delete items based on setting added in the gfmorris release is live and running nightly.
• New users no longer have their prefs reset on login. (forum thread)

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]