Building Feedly

Three more weeks to go. We are almost there feature-wise. The focus now is shifting to bug fixes and performance tests. We have one favor to ask you: if in the next 3 weeks, you run into any errors or “the feeddo service is not avaible”, please send us an brief email to edwink@devhd.com. Thank you!

We just pushed out 0.9.80. It includes the first iteration of the lounge concept. We hope that this will be an extra incentive for people to annotate the most interesting articles. (To annotate, drill down into the article page, highlight a snippet of text and select annotate).

More to come over the week end.

Productive team meeting on Friday night. Finalizing “the cafe” concept and preparing for the 1.0b1 landing later this month.

Here is a first iteration of what the content of the cafe tab might look like (the goal is to showcase better the annotation capabilities of feeddo and the interactions between the users).

There are still a few snakes to kill but you would expect the cafe to surface into your feeddo in the next 2 weeks. This is one of the last concepts we want to finalize before 1.0b1 goes out.

Thank you to Olivier, Elisa, Brian and Cyril for their input and influence during the design of this feature!

If you are running version 0.9.62 or higher, you should be able to see (on wordpress powered blogs) an early view of what we are thinking regarding comments integration. We also fixed the smart update bug in firefox 3 and finished the migration to the new coloc service provider and servers so there should be a lot let turbulence during the next 18 days.

The next phase for the feeddo experience is to announce a more formal beta program to try to get more people in and listen to their feedback and see how we stack up, learn and continue to iterate. We are currently shooting for April 15th. April 30th, 21 (+15) days from now. Between now and then, we are going to continue to aggressively integrate as much as the feedback we have collected in the last four weeks and organize the beta program announcement. To keep this process as open and transparent as possible, we will report on our progress every couple of days.

March 24th, 2008

Migrated the back end to our new “aston” server (aka s4.feeddo.com). We should have 3x the capacity that we currently have on “porsche”.

Ability to sync with FriendFeed

Automatic sync of feeddo people and Google Reader friends

Started performance test based on the Robert Scoble use case (700 feeds, 250 follows)

Infrastructure for detecting 302 redirect in Firefox when using XMLHTTPRequest

Fixed 7 bugs.

Quick heads up: We are trying to address all the bugs and suggestions you have reported in the last fours weeks and transition to a more open beta program by April 15th. Some of the changes are significant and there are a lot of moving parts so if you see some turbulence in the next 2-3 weeks please bare with us: things might get worse but they will get better. Finally if you have things that you would like to see addressed and haven’t sent us an email or an IM, this is a good time to be vocal.

Thank you for your patience/support!

We tried to make it easier for people to know where there are by adding a breadcrumb to the feeddo navigation module.

Special Thanks to Brian Curry and Parham Akhavan (of Booknolia) for their feedback! If you are running 0.7.x, you will need to manually update feeddo to 0.9.x to see this feature appear.

The feedback from our alpha users has been that the feeddo what’s new page was not good enough. They wanted less information and more relevancy. So we went back to the drawing board. The result is a new “column view” which can be applied to the what’s new section of feeddo. Here is what it looks like:

We are trying to find the right balance between relevance, simplicity and fun. If you are running 0.7.146 or higher, you should be able to activate this view but clicking on the column view icon.

Note: We hope that this will be an extra incentive for people to continue to annotate and recommend.

(Thank you to Elisa, Oliv and Cyril for their input)

People did not really like the first feeddo+email integration….So here is take 2. This time, we have integrated feeddo with gmail and you can now send email directly from within feeddo. The integration includes integration with the gmail address book so if you have your contacts defined in gmail, you will be able to benefit from auto-completion.

Here is a screenshot of what the integration looks like:

Thanks to the hard work of Merlin, feeddo is getting better at keyboard navigation. Here is a picture of the shortcut help (click on ? to display it).

I am personally not much of a keyboard user but my favorite shortcut is gg: it allows you to search for a category or feed and jump directly to the right page. Very nice!

(Inspired by Google Reader with which we tried to remain as compatible as possible).

We have been toying with the notion of adding a cover to feeddo, something to emphasize “simple and fun” focus, something that would provide a more relaxed and ambient experience.

If you are running 0.7.136 or higher, click and hold the feeddo star button for more than 2 seconds and you should see the browser load the first iteration of the cover. We have more ideas we will be integrating in the next four weeks but we thought we would ask your feedback first.

(Thank you to Maya for being the inspiration for this feature!)

version 0.7.122 is out. Feeddo is getting a new scrolling behavior: it should help make the experience simpler (specially if you are running feeddo on a smaller display). Inspired by iPhoto and Google Maps. Thanks to Jason Ghodsian for his input during the design of this feature.

The annotations feature got an upgrade this evening: now every time you open an article, you will be able to see all the annotations of all the people who are in your network.

 This is particularly interesting when combined with recommendations. Thank you (MC)2 for pulling this off!

We added an image grid view to enhance the experience when you are looking at flickr photo feeds.

This view works not only with flickr but any other feed which would include an image. There are a couple of other interesting things we would like to do with images so please stay tuned.

We have extended the dashboard to simplify the task of “spring cleaning” your feeds.

We included some of the reading patterns information to help pinpoint which feeds need your attention: green means healthy, orange means overdose, red means dead. We also dramatically reduced the number of clicks required to unsubscribe or edit an subscription.

Thank you for Rajesh R. and David K. for their input.

You can, as of 0.7.94, sort the tabs in feeddo to match your personal preferences. Simply drag and drop to re-order:

Thanks for Demed and Rajesh (and sorry it took so long!)

We want over the next 4 weeks improve the feeddo UI (font, colors, layout) - specially for windows users. You will see part of that work being rolled out as part of 0.7.73 which is being pushed out as I type. Things might get worse before they get better. We are committed to making quick changes and address all the issues and suggestion you will raise so please be vocal!

Thank you for your patience!

Note: one of the goals of this effort is to clean up the UI implementation so that feeddo can more easily support multiple themes. Once we have a good enough default theme, we will invest in offer more themes as requested by many of you during the iteration 5 discussions.

One of our motivations for starting the feeddo project was that we were not satisfied with the iTunes + AppleTV experience when it comes to it ability to viewing internet video on a TV screen.

“Finding podcasts, subscribing to them in iTunes, downloading the content, sync’ing it, finding it on the TV, viewing it” did not feel like a seamless experience. Apple has addressed some of that with the YouTube integration which is a much simpler browser and view experience.

Our goal for feeddo+AppleTV is to offer a YouTube like experience but based on the videos embedded in you existing RSS subscriptions, and while organizing the content based on your friends’ recommendations and your personal preferences.

We have broken down this project into 3 parts:

1. change the configuration of Apple TV to include a feeddo menu with would lunch a full-screen, Apple TV optimized version of feeddo.
2. port streets to WebKit 3.0. As much as we love Firefox, WebKit is the best technology choice for the Apple TV and mobile devices going forward (this also means that you will be able to run feeddo on Safari on the desktop)
3. create a new full-screen, Apple TV optimized version of the feeddo experience.

Oliv just finished part 1.

We are going to do our best to deliver a first iteration of part 2 and 3 by Dec 31st.

(Thanks to Oliv for pulling part 1 off!)

You can now annotate the articles you read in feeddo.

In the article view, when you select a fragment of text, a small pop-up appears next to the selection. Simply click on it to start annotating the article and add comments to your annotations. Annotations will be automatically shared if you recommend the article. Expect to see a lot more in this area after Thanksgiving!

Kudos to Merlin for pulling this off!

note 1: you can use ALT+click to comment an entire paragraph or a picture.

note 2: there is a new “Your Name” option in the preference page. The initials seen in the comment box are computed based its value.

In the initial feeddo design, we positioned the side area on the right, to enhance the idea that the content was the central concept. A few users requested that we add a customization knob and let them decided if the side area should be on the left or on the right. We listened:

As of 0.7.67, you should see an option in the side area customization popup allowing you to position the side area on the left. We will continue to make sure going forward that the UI can more to support both options.

Thank you to Sandor, Anshu for their feedback.

We have been focusing over the last 7 days on making feeddo more keyboard friendly.

To do so, we added, to lists, the notion of selected article. You can change the selection with up arrow and down arrow (as well as j/k). Once you find an article which is interesting, you can drill down into it using the right arrow (or enter). When you are down reading the article, you can drill back up with the left arrow (or the delete key). This also works with the preview window.

When an article is selected, you can press on r (or s) to recommend it, on l to save for later or on p to preview it.

We also added a configuration knob for feeddo to automatically mark an article as read if it is selected for more than 3 seconds. If you do not like this behavior, you can turn it off in the preference page. Search for: “Auto-Mark As Read On Selection”.

(Thank you to Anshu for helping flush out this feature!)

Update: Nov 13th - the Auto-Mark As Read On Selection ended up being more annoying than useful so it is gone in version 0.7.68. Thanks to Francois and Elisa for their feedback!

feeddo users can now publish the list of the feeds they recommend the most to their facebook profile. We call it the feeddo facebook widget.

We focused initially on two goals:

goal #1) help people discover what feeds their friends recommend most (ie a dynamic blogroll based on the number of articles you recommend in feeddo and google reader).

goal #2) allow user to add each other to their feeddo network and start co-reading. Both aspects will be further polished so if you are an existing feeddo preview user, we look forward to your feedback.

Thanks to David K., Anshu S., Jason K., Oliv and Elisa for their help and feedback during the design of this feature!

Now that iteration 4 is out, we got a chance to circle around with some of the users and discuss about rough edges and how they could be polished in iteration 5.

Jason S.

• What are friends? What is the number on top of friends? [fixed in 0.7.36]
• When you click on preview/title of an article, you do no get a consistent behavior.[fixed in 0.7.39]
• Add icons to the actions to have a visual language.
• Allow me to mark an article as unread.
• Space/Shift+space does not work consistently on all pages. [fixed in 0.7.37]

Ludo D.

• Ability to only show favorites in the dashboard.
• I hate it when in the a subscription has 5 unread articles and you only show me 3. The drill down into the subscription view is too much of a context switch. Note: Ludo switched to the “sort by time view” to try to address the issue but he prefers when the articles of the same source are grouped together. He just wants a more intelligent layout and less of a context switch.

Sandor N.

• There is [too much] learning curve. The default customization seems complex and the scrollbar/scrolling is different. I would like to get a list of 50-100 articles and scroll/scan/read them at the same time.
• I would like to have the option to move the sidebar to the left of the page.
• I like the “discover new feeds” area… should have some form of refresh button to get another new feed, without having to flip through pages.

Mike B.

• Feeddo is cutting off some articles on the right. Major pain in the a$$! I’ll attach a screen shot. Notice in the screen shot how some of the words to the right are cutoff by the container on the right. It doesn’t happen all the time, just on certain articles…haven’t really trouble shot to figure out exactly when. But sometimes the cutoff is worse than others (I think…)

Eric M.

• I am subscribed to multiple “planet” feeds that sometimes syndicate the same blogs… Making me read the same entries multiple times.
• Can we improve the experience around reading partial feeds?
• IE support. I do not install FF on my windows machines.
• Ability to filter articles based on the language.

Vincent M.

• I can not switch until you support authenticated feeds.
• I would like to see an option in the dashboard to mark all the feeds are read.

Jon M.

• It would be nice to have an explicit way to add a feed. Sometimes I have a URL and want to add it. It took me a few seconds to remember the +f way of doing it.
• I would recommend some sort of status/title so that in a multiple tab scenario in firefox I can simply look at the tab to see that there is new articles in my favorite list (maybe simply an ‘*’)

Jason K.

• On Mac, the font weight seems to change on mouse over.
• Feeddo gets stuck thinking I’m offline when I’m not, normally on a
  network change. Reloading my proxy configuration doesn’t seem to help; a full restart of FF is required.
• In certain scenarios, like selecting a particular feed, the focus doesn’t go to the feed window (the list of articles). I have to click in that window in order to use the cursor keys.

Orjan L.

• Ability to print all the articles in the “save for later” queue.
• I would like to have more options for rating subscriptions. favorite/no favorite is good but not enough.
• I would like to be able to manually define the orders of the subscriptions using drag and drop.
• enhance the email article option to a) support gmail and b) improve the formatting for outlook

Rakesh S.

• I would like to be able to see articles which are related to the article I am currently reading.

Rajesh R.

• It would be nice to be able to manually define the order the categories appear in the navigation bar.
• The preview/open article behavior is not consistent.[fixed in 0.7.39]
• Make is easier to delete the set of subscriptions which are not producing content or which I am no longer reading

Erwan A.

• I would like to be able to define my own skin/RSS.
• Ability to sort and filter feeds on the dashboard: number of unreads, categories, etc..
• Make feeddo compatible with Ad Blocker
• feeddo browsing is not accounted for in history. Read a few entries then hit Ctrl-h, and none of your browsing is displayed (that may be a feature ? i may want it to appear in my history, so a preferences switch might be handy)
• One thing i’d like to be able to is to recommend entries from blogs i’m not subscribed to. Simple UI ala del.icio.us
• I would like to add a custom “blog this” action to articles. I use a dotclear blog.

David K.

• When you click + add then you get a blue window appearing to the left and it somehow feels wrong, the usage pattern that I fell into was to click a few recommendations and the mouse move to the left to click on the button around the collections dialogue just felt a little clumsy.
• Second piece of feedback is when you look at the list of most recommended feeds and some feeds you are subscribed to are shown there but without a +add button again felt wrong, felt like it should have a - remove button next to it rather than a blank space
• better integration with firefox bookmarks:during the boostrap experience, allow me to add populate feeddo based on my bookmarks. Also add a feeddo entry to the bookmark so that I can browse and scan my feeds through the bookmarks and then drop in feeddo in the right place.
• Take a blog with lots and lots and lots of entries like Johnathon Schwartz for example, when you hit top with a croll you get the nice top message and the same when you hit the bottom, however if you scroll down fast then you often get a stop in the scroll and a loading message which is not as elegant.
• Reordering collections. It feels like the collections should be mobile and that you should be able to reorder their position in the blue bar by dragging them around. And how do you do maintenance on your collections (and sub collections) maybe they should be called something like topics rather than collections. I have been looking for how to delete collections, edit the spelling of collections and how to move them about.
• I would like to be able to search for someone’s recommendation feed by name and subscribe to it.
• The friends concept should be clearer. [started new iteration in 0.7.41]

Maha N.

• I am using feeddo to tract financial. Recommendations should be more targeted.
• I woud like to be able to turn on notifications on when new articles are available.
• feeddo should try to better support audio and video. I would like to listen to all my podcasts in feeddo.
• Can you inline the comments associated with the article in the article page?

Merlin

• I have a iTunes feed for the stuff I bought as a test item. I view that feed all inline. The downside here is that every entry as a multimedia entry (music) or video. When I load the page ALL of them get loaded at once. That ends up being “slow” - we need to have something better in place for a such case - a placeholder in place for that …..
• In the daily from 0.7.41 ( 323), I am not sure I like the removal of the “Suggested feeds” from the page yet. I know you would take your friends recommendations any time but somehow that has grown one me ….
• I like to be able to customize fonts at the browser level. Feeddo does not seen to adapt to the font size change.

Greg P.

• I have been having issues with the auto-upgrade. I need to manually re-install.
• Try to make sure that the UI does not get too busy as you add more features.
• Do not show an empty white box in the about area if there are not pictures metadata information for the blog.
• Is there a way to get the Best Of articles associated with a feed?

Iain S.

• I like to be able to customize fonts at the browser level. Feeddo does not seen to adapt to the font size change.
• My list is customized and sorted by subscription. I get 3 items listed on the left panel per rss feed by default.
  It would be nice if in this view there was an option to add a slight background colour per rss feed on the main panel.
  eg: feed 1 shows three items and it has a very slight background, feed two then kicks in with no background / white, feed 3 kicks in with the slight background, feed 4 white / no background etc… I find it a touch hard to notice the red font feed name, then the number of updates and the poplist to mark them as read etc.. when in this view.
• to the immediate left of the ‘customize list’ link, there is a slider for minimal feed reading and maxed out feed reading. It would be nice as an option to also be able to click on the small icons to the left and right of the slider, instead of using the slider itself. The one line, or many lines representing the views.
• allow me to pick my custom color scheme for the top menu, side menu, etc.
• A “whats new” splash screen when feeddo loads, if there is new functionality.

Ashwin P.

• feeddo should help me discover high quality feeds based on my subscription and reading patterns.

Oliv

• would it be possible to “detach” a video or audio so we can keep watching/listening to it while reading more posts?
• would it be possible to get a visual alert when someone added a comment to an article i recommended ?
• would it be possible to add my comment to an existing comment?
• when you read an article it would be great to see if it was already recommanded by a friend.

Iteration 5

We are going to continue to circle back with more users and capture/share their recommendations as well. In the meantime, the focus for iteration 5 is going to be:
1) try to address as many of these rough edges as possible
2) deliver annotate+share
3) enhance the dashboard to include spring cleaning
4) adapt the layout/experience based on the type of feeds (starting with photos and videos)
5) create a first iteration of the week end edition

The delivery of iteration 5 is going to be very incremental with a new build going out every 3-4 days. If there is anything else you would like to see added, please post a comment or send me an email.

Thanks again to all the people/friends who take the time to kick the tires and provide us this very useful feedback (over and over again).

Here is a quick cheat sheet on the keyboard shortcut supported by feeddo - as of version0.7.31:

page up/page down: allow you to scroll through and between pages. In the case where you are looking at an extended list, the page scroll will adjust so that the beginning of the next article in the list is at the top of the page.
space/shift+space: equivalent to page down/page up
left arrow/right arrow: in the article view, the arrow key allows you to jump to the next/previous article without having to scroll through the content of the existing article.
r: in the article view, toggle recommend
l: in the article view, toggle save for later
p: in the article view, preview the website associated with the article

We have also implemented some shortcut to be consistent with the current Google Reader shortcuts.
j/k: in the extended list view, scrolls to next/previous article.
s: recommend. note: articles recommended in feeddo are automatically starred and shared in google reader.

Let us know if there are other behaviors you would like to see accessible through keyboard shortcuts.

(Thanks to Orjan L. for his input and help)

Iteration 4 is out and you should get it automatically next time you restart your browser. New and noteworthy: extended list support, simplified user interface, 20% faster page load and a more consistent scrollbar control. We also addresses 37 bugs/rough edges.

To try the extended list view, go to any subscription list and use the slider on the top right to adjust the size of the summary. The 4th position to the right will show you the entire content of the article inlined. This is also available on category views when the category articles are sorted by time.

Next week, we are focusing on allowing users to highlight/annotate articles as well as customize the order in which the tabs are displayed. We are also working in parallel on iteration 5 which is a re-design of the home page and support for the feeddo week-end edition.

Here is how is works. We have various agents polling for various aspects of the feeddo service. If there is any problem, they twit the status of the service to http://twitter.com/feeddo. We can follow feeddo to receive SMS messages when problems are detected. We will also include that status back into feeddo.com so that users can have real-time visibility into the problems we are running into and what the team is doing to address them. Simple and transparent.

Part of the interest of building a service is the learning curve of designing, scaling out and monitoring the hardware layer. It is good to see Feeddo reach to stage 2. So far, so good! (And thank you to all the passionate and hard working people developing amazing open source products!)

(Thanks Oliv!)

So that we can reconfigure our network and move some boxes around. Have a great week end!

Update: it is 5:25pm PST and Feeddo is back up.

If you have a delicious account and version 1.5 of the delicious Firefox plug-in then you should see an additional “save to delicious” action in the article action menu. This is an example of how firefox extensions can offer services to each other. Note: we are going to further integrate Feeddo and delicious once the annotation/tagging framework is in place.

feeddo now let’s you share the list of articles you recommend with your friends and subscribe to their recommendation feed. This is a nice way to help each other filter through articles and discover each others most recommended feeds.

If you are part of the preview program, here are five tasks we would like you to try out and give us usability feedback on:
Task 1 - Find a couple of articles you like and recommend them.
Task 2 - Find in feeddo the list of articles you have recommended.
Task 3 - Email me you list of recommended articles so that I can add you to my circle of friends
Task 4 - Someone in your circle of friend and view the lastest articles he has recommended and his/her most recommended feeds.

Here are a few of recommendations feeds/people you can add to your circle of friends (note: currently these pages are only visible if you have version 0.7.22 of feeddo so you might have to restart your browser to get it):
Robert Scoble - Tech
Oliv - Security, Cars, Gadget
Ludovic Dubost - Tech, Entrepreneurship
Edwin - Tech, Design, Entrepreneurship

Thank you to Oliv and Cyril to help flush out the concept/experience. We look forward to your feedback/suggestions.

FEATURE - Added a Quicklist UI so that users can see the list of articles they have previously quicklisted. Think of the quicklist as a tray in which you can temporarily queue articles you want to review later. Thank you to Rajesh for his collaboration on this feature.

FEATURE - In context customization of the What’s New List, including the ability to filter out empty subscriptions. Thank you to Ludo and Rajesh for suggesting this.

Have a great week end!

Mainly bug fixes and polish work. Thanks to all the preview users for all their feedback (and their patience).

FEATURE - Ability to see YouTube videos from YouTube RSS feeds directly in the article page (Thanks Michal).

FEATURE - Ability to customize the size of the article overview in the subscription list page. We currently offer three default size: One line title, A picture and a summary or a larger picture. We are going to make this more granular/elastic but want to hear from you about the direction we are heading.

FIXED - Changed installed.rdf to request minimum support of Firefox 2.0. There is some issue with the self update in Firefox 1.5. Thank you to Eric for reporting this problem.

ENHANCED - Using a new service provider for the distribution and update of our static content. This should result in 30x faster download (Thank you to Olive for driving this).

ENHANCED - Re-organized the tab bar to emphasize on user categories. about, directory, logout and preferences were moved under others. Thank you to Rajesh for the feedback.

ENHANCED - Resized the dashbaord so that we can display 4 columns on 15″ screen. Thank you to Ludo for the feedback.

ENHANCED - Added support for capital letters in category labels (ex Potes != potes). Thanks Erwan.

ENHANCED - Including version number in the error report dialog. Thanks Erwan.

IMPL - Fixed type in ruler: was referencing an HTML element directly by it name, instead of using $elem(). Thanks Erwan.

ENHANCED - Error reporting so that subscription error are displayed on the UI.

FIXED - Execption thrown while unsubscribing from a subscription with “auto-mark as read” on. Thanks to Rajesh for reporting this problem.

FIXED - When poping back the expanded WHAT’S NEW? section, in some cases, the less | dashboard links where not reverted back to the more link.

ENHANCED - The WHAT’S NEW section to take advantage of the entire screen real estate (and make sure that the more expansion link is always visible (even on smaller displays).

Some people are surprised to see Feeddo being so far from our infrastructure roots/base. On the one hand, it is true that it is a stretch (and an interesting learning experience). On the other hand, the Feeddo consumer service is only the tip of the iceberg. In this post, I am going to explain how it relates to some of the infrastructure trends we believe in.

Trend #1: The emergence of a new UI/logic abstraction

Every once in a while a new abstraction emerges which divides and refines a problem space: SQL and the relational data model enabled the separation of the data model from the core of the application. Over the last five to six years, they has been a lot of emulation around web services and content syndication. We believe that, as a result, we have reached the point where the combination of REST, JSON and ATOM/RSS is going to enable a significantly better abstraction for separating user interface and business logic. Significantly better because …significantly simpler, …inherently document-oriented and coarse-grained, …supporting both structured, semi-structured, multi-media and micro-formated documents and …language/platform neutral.

Trend #2: Federated data and services

A large number of the existing applications depend on a single data source/database. The reason this pattern has been dominant is that it simplifies transaction processing and management of the application. Integration is usually performed as a back end batch process where data is replicated to other systems.

But a shift, driven by the increasing size of the data, the need for more real-time experiences and the need to integrate with transactions systems which can not be replicated, is about to happen. You see already a lot of “mash-ups” emerging which try to tie together data and services from multiple back ends in a more dynamic and transactional fashion. The iTunes ATT iPhone activation being one of the most interesting one.

We believe that more patterns and infrastructure components are going to emerge to simplify the complexity of building reliable and transactional applications across a distributed data model and that the abstraction we described in trend #1 will be an important catalyst.

Trend #3: Evolution of business logic

As a cleaner separation emerges between the UI and business logic, the server frameworks will evolve to increase the congruence of the interface required by the abstraction and the mental model of the developer.

Data abstractions will evolve into semi-structured multi-media documents captured in JSON and ATOM. Business Logic will the partitioned into pipelines of -multi-language- interceptors - assembled using declarative policies and business rules - processing business documents - either synchronously or asynchronously. The persistence layer will evolve into a data grid model combining traditional databases, cluster caches (like memcached or tangasol) and storage services (like amazon S3).

Trends #4: Evolution of the presentation/interaction logic.

This is one of the areas where there is still a lot of emulation and it is not clear which pattern(s) might dominate.

We are cheering for AJAX plus and are huge fans of the work firefox and Yahoo have done over the last seven years in terms of defining patterns which allow combinations of HTML (domain model), CSS (presentation logic) and Javascript (behavior logic) and respect the page centric, URL addressable nature of the internet/browser.

Feeddo

Feeddo started as an experience to help us explore, validate and adapt some of these trends: … building the Feeddo UI allows us to understand some of the consistent set of issues developers face when building mash-ups, …building the Feeddo back end allows us to understand the consistent set of issues developers face when building RESTful services driven by JSON and ATOM and finally delivering Feeddo as a service to consumers allows us to understand the operational aspects of the problem as well as a directly link to what next generation information portals might look like.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”

This post in a more “infrastructure view of Feeddo” which I hope will initiate some interesting technical discussions. In my next post I will try to talk more about the innovation and design dimensions of Feeddo and what we do to measure those more subjective aspects of the project.

Continuing to focus on polish and bug fixes.

FIXED - Synchronize login state with Google Reader if the user has both application open. Thank you to Nicolas for suggesting this.

FIXED - Do not trigger auto-mark as read if the page is being refresh because of customization/preference changes.

IMPL - Refactored the preferences service to understand the notion of context and layering so that when a property is changed back to it default or base value, customization is deleted.

FIXED - Bug in sync logic causing in some update cases the unread count to be higher than the number of visible unread articls.

ENHANCED - Feeddo should be able to detect that fact that the computer was in a sleep session and sync the profile the very first time you access it after the sleep session. Thank you to Jon M. and Michal for reporting this.

FIXED - Regression where Feeddo would load an empty page if the user does not use the Google “Remember User” option when loging in. Thank you to Nicolas, Ludovic and Mike B. for reporting this.

FEATURE - Added an error reporting framework which displays exceptions in a page which a link to email them back to us to that we can investigate them. This will be improved shortly to support capture of the Feeddo client logs so that there is some context as to when the exception occured.

IMPL - refactored the use of Javascript eval to convert JSON data into Javascript objects into a EvalUtils helper component to optimize the use of the YUI compressor.

ENHANCED - Tried to tone down the sensitivity of the mouse wheel with regard to scrolling through pages to avoid the case where the user would scroll through 2 pages in one scroll gesture. Some of the Apple devices are very sensitive. We will see if over time, we need to expose a preference knob to let the user further customize this bevavior. Let us know what you think about this.

FIXED - Issue where Feeddo would refresh the content of the search box used to filter the content of the dashboard if you try very fast.

It is polish time: we are back in the trenches, putting in a lot of hours and trying to get as many bugs out and as many details in. Thank you to all the users who are providing us daily feedback and bug reports. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

ENHANCED - Enhanced the auto-mark as read behavior to NOT trigger it when the user is drilling down (for a category list to a feed list to an article). “I am wandering if the auto-read function could be fine-tuned a little bit. Perhaps It should only trigger on ’scroll to the next page’ in the feed view only, not when jumping into the article view. Get it ? This way the list of 7 articles I am looking at is marked as ‘read’ only when I scroll, not when I jump into read the articles. It’s a small modification of the current behavior”. Thank you Michal for suggesting this.

FIXED - If you select “hide read articles in a subscription view and read some articles and then scroll to the next page, then a couple of unread articles will slip through the cracks. The number of unread articles which sleep through the cracks is equal to the number of articles that where just read on the first page. Thank you Rajesh and Tim G for reporting this.

FIXED - Edito does not partition the page correctly when the user selects “hide read articles”. For some reason, space seems to be allocated to subscriptions which do not have unread articles left, resulting in portion of the page remaining white. Thank you Rajesh and Tim G for reporting this.

ENHANCED - Display list of matching subscriptions in the dashboard as you type. Thank you Michal for suggesting this.

FIXED - Cyclic loop when entering a search term which has no results in the dashboard. Thank you Michal for reporting this.

FEATURE - Ability to filter the list of subscriptions in the dashboard.

FIXED - Fixed the logout redirect issue where after logout user was redirected to the Google login page.

FEATURE - The up/down arrows work nicely and “auto-scroll” to next article in the article view. But the left-right arrows used to just jump to the next article without scrolling to the end of the current one. Thank you to Michal for suggesting this.

ENHANCED - Enabled navigation using page-up and page-down keys in cateogory and subscription pages. Thanks to Rajesh for helping troubleshoot that.

ENHANCED - Improved the caching algorithm to take advantage of the fact that Google is now tracking up to 1000 unread articles. There is still work to do in this front because from the UI level, I do not think that people care about knowing the details, so we will most likely round it to 50+.

ENHANCED - Added a 250ms delay between when the end of a scrollable article is reached in the article view and the time we trigger the jump to the next article. Trying to address muruga’s feedback regarding the sensitivity of the jump.

FIXED - Problem setting and overwriting filtering preferences. This was due to a true versus “true” issue. Thank you to Rajesh for reporting this.

FIXED - Problem scrolling through the directory on Windows. Thank you to Greg for reporting this problem.

Last Tuesday, the Google Reader team added support for search, a really cool feature which allows users to search for articles across all their feeds, in a specific category or in a specific feed. Kudos to the Google Reader team for pulling this off…it is not trivial task very well executed!

In Feeddo 0.7.8, we have integrated it in.

Another way to think about this is that when you subscribe to feeds, you create/configure your own personal search engine. Try it and let us know what you think.

Note: We took advantage of the UI to create a subscription filtering mechanism in the dashboard. Thank you to Ludo for suggesting this!

Here is a new major update. If you are part of the preview program please upgrade (see email for more information). We fixed twenty three bugs (including unread counts getting out of sync), continued our CPU and memory optimization efforts (including fixing a regression in the cache module which resulted in a CPU spike - *big* thank you to Ludo, Michal and Jok for reporting this issue) and shaved a few hundred milliseconds from the load time.

The bonus feature for this build is a new customization framework which 1) allows us to expose the preference knobs in context of the page they are used (which should make the customization task more WYSIWYG and intuitive) and 2) allows the user to select different preferences for different category and subscription pages (which will become more interesting once we start offer various sorting and templating options).

This week, we are going to continue our bug fixing and stabilization efforts and try to prioritize the feature train for 0.7.x.

FIXED - Regression in streets API refactoring prevented Feeddo to persist preferences. Changed where lost after restart. This has been fixed and preference changes should persist across restart. Specifically, if you have been playing with the auto-’mark as read’ feature, you will have to make the preference change again. Thank you to Olive for reporting this.

FIXED - Regression in rendering of edge category pages with small number of unread items. The logic assumed 3 subscriptions per page which is not the case with the edge cases. This has been fixed and you should be able to scroll to the edge pages  without problem.

ENHANCED - Implemented Rajesh’s idea to delay the auto-’mark as read’ behavior until the user actually navigates to the next page. This should make the auto-mark as read feature much more intuitive. Try it and let us know.

FIXED   - Bug in edito where the page before the last would only render 2 out of the 3 expected subscriptions. Thanks to Rajesh for reporting this.

Have a great long week end!