Feedlooks Blog

Feedlooks is for sale

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:55:00 -0400

Feedlooks is a tremendous RSS and Twitter aggregation platform, battle-tested by thousands of responsive users. It’s been a remarkable ride thus far.

Alas, due to my involvement with other projects, I won’t be able to continue Feedlooks’s development. There’s tremendous room for growth, and some killer ideas on the back-burner. So I’m looking for a new home for Feedlooks.

There are hundreds of thousands of feeds in our database, all monitored and updated by a relentless homegrown crawler.

In its 15+ months of development, Feedlooks’s infrastructure has benefited from the constant feedback of our users, leading to an enormous degree of feed compatibility.

By design, Feedlooks was built to be cross-browser compatible. That means for every tiny new feature added, a full cross-browser test was run to ensure everything looked and behaved as planned.

Aside from its solid infrastructure, Feedlooks has also introduced some really novel and non-trivial features, including the ability to display feed contents in their original format (by means of a proprietary proxy), and a custom URL shortener that displays a Feedlooks advertisement (the shortener is used whenever users share an article within Feedlooks):

http://flks.co/1ihent

If you’re interested in adopting it, please contact me at arturadib@gmail.com.

By user demand: Move feed to top

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:21:31 -0500

A quick note for users with more subscriptions than they can handle:

You can now move your favorite feeds to the top of the list, so that when you check your new posts they come up prioritized, i.e. on top of all the others. It’s a simple feature, but very handy - after all, we all have our pet feeds!

To use it, click on the ‘Feed options’ menu (upside-down triangle) to the right of the desired feed, and choose ‘Move feed to top’. You can use the same menu to undo this action (‘Restore feed position’).

As usual, don’t hesitate to leave us a message if you run into any kind of difficulties.

Enjoy!

-Artur

Our revamped interface

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 09:06:13 -0500

Greetings Feedlookers,

As you may have noticed, our main interface (Home window) has changed considerably. The main goal was to create a more intuitive experience, while also paving the way for some major features coming up in the near future.

The largest change is moving all the control buttons (New, Archives, Add feed, filters, etc) to the left pane. The right pane is now used exclusively to display content.

You will also notice that the New posts option now falls back to recent (last 24h) posts, in case there are no new items since you last checked (with the due alert, of course). This replaces that large blank screen with the sad face, and hopefully leads to a richer experience for new users.

Stay tuned for more exciting changes in the pipeline, and as usual, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line with your feedback.

-Artur

Duplicate Tweets

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 11:29:49 -0500

Twitter is a young, skyrocketing platform, so you can imagine the kinds of challenges they must be facing in order to handle the exponential growth of users and Tweets.

Accordingly, they have recently made some internal changes to their platform that affects how clients identify the uniqueness of a Tweet. Most Twitter clients were affected by this change in one way or another.

One consequence of this change for Feedlooks users is that you will likely see some (probably the last 20) old Tweets in your timeline repeated.

I’m really sorry about this inconvenience - the repeats should happen only once.

PS: Please don’t hesitate to contact us if the repeats happen more than once (there’s a contact form under “More” in the Feedlooks toolbar).

-Artur

New goodies: content preloading, keyboard shortcuts, retweet button, and more!

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 21:02:32 -0500

Today I’m very excited to make public a major revamp of our web app - I can’t remember the last time we have released so many amazing features in one shot.

The first and most noticeable feature was introduced in response to two common user feedbacks: (1) that the snippets were too short to know what a post is about, and (2) that posts take too long to load.

Our response to these concerns is a two-click feature, which we believe dramatically enhances the overall user experience: when you click on a post once, instead of going immediately to the site of origin, you now get a longer snippet of the post. And while you are reading the snippet, Feedlooks is automatically preloading the post content in the background, so that if you decide to read the post in full by clicking on it again, most of the content will already be available in your browser. Streamlined, fast, awesome.

Next up, also thanks to several user requests, is keyboard shortcuts. Go ahead and use those arrow keys to navigate through your posts, hit Enter to open it, and Esc to bring back the Home window. Additional shortcuts are available; you can get the full low-down by looking for the corresponding question under “More > FAQ”.

You will also notice that sharing is now easier than ever. When you click on a post once, you get the literally hundreds of sharing options offered by AddThis right below the post, for instant access. (By the way, did you know that those sharing options remember your favorite services? The most actively used ones are shown to the left of the ‘plus’ symbol).

In addition to the sharing options offered by AddThis, Feedlooks is also introducing a one-click retweet button for your Twitter feeds. (Did you know you can link up Feedlooks to your Twitter account? It’s under “Add feed”). Sharing tweets was never so easy.

I look forward to hearing your feedback on these features, and stay tuned - more awesome features are already in the pipeline!

-Artur

We're moving!

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 22:34:58 -0400

Feedlooks is moving to Linode, along with lots of performance optimizations. Expect downtime off-and-on all day tomorrow (Oct 21 2010).

Servers under maintenance. Expect about one hour.

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 13:07:31 -0400

We’re making a quick change on our servers infrastructure that should greatly speed up your response times.

Please check back again in about an hour, or follow us on Twitter for the most up-to-date information.

-Artur

Large spike in usage today. Please bear with us.

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 13:44:11 -0400

Feedlooks is experiencing a large spike in usage today (Monday, Sep 20), which might be slowing things down for some users.

I’m fully aware of this. Please be patient as I optimize a few things on our end to deal with this increased demand.

-Artur

Interview with Feedlooks founder Artur Adib at SabiaVida.com

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 10:04:38 -0400

I have been recently interviewed by Miguel de Luis, an active blogger and Feedlooks user from the Canary Islands (Spain). You can read it in full on his blog [the interview is in English, though there’s a brief introduction in Spanish].

I talked about the infamous debate concerning the death of RSS and the surge of Twitter, about the motives behind Feedlooks, as well as a bit about my own background.

As usual, comments are always welcome.
-Artur

The New vs. Old model: Feeds are disposable, e-mails are not.

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 13:42:58 -0400

I frequently get asked by our users: How can I mark an item or a feed as read?

The short answer I give is: you can’t. But not because we’ve been lazy and didn’t bother to implement this rather simple feature. Rather, the reason is because you don’t need to, at least not in Feedlooks.

Instead of the Read vs. Unread model widely used in e-mail clients (and, unfortunately, in some feed readers too), Feedlooks adopts a much simpler approach to reading feeds: New vs. Old.

Every time you log into Feedlooks, by default you only see the (New) articles that have been posted since the last time you checked in. It’s that simple. All of the other items (Old) you have already had the chance to see are automatically moved to the, what else, Archives, unless you explicitly ask it not to do so (using the Lock or Pin features).

The rationale behind this model is that feeds are much more like news than e-mails. When I open my e-mail inbox, I know that the vast majority of those messages (spam aside) are relevant; they are, after all, directed specifically at me.

Contrast this to feeds, which can inundate your inbox with tons of ‘disposable’ articles, a small percentage of which you might actually want to read. Most of us simply skim through the headlines and snippets, and end up clicking on a select few only.

The model not only makes sense; it can also considerably streamline your feed reading experience by avoiding the need to constantly mark posts and feeds you have already skimmed over as ‘read’.

In the New vs. Old model, there is no need to fight against an ever-increasing Unread Counter; the New Counter, by design, will be reset to however many New items are there in the pipeline upon every check. (Again, unless you ask it not to).

Please refer to our FAQ under Help for more information. Also feel free to drop us a line using the Feedback button in the toolbar.

-Artur

Feedlooks: Connecting users to blogs

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 12:33:22 -0400

Feedlooks is bringing serious innovation to the feed reading arena.

You might enjoy it because of its concise summary of new items, accompanied by a handy Interest Meter to gauge the popularity of each article. Or perhaps you love it because you get to read your Twitter feed right alongside your RSS feeds. Or because you don’t ever, ever have to keep marking your feeds as read or unread anymore.

But the real innovation behind Feedlooks is far more ambitious: to connect users directly to blogs. Unlike traditional readers that were seemingly designed when all of the internet was based on dial-up connections, Feedlooks focuses on displaying content in full visual glory, as opposed to boring plain-text.

Displaying content in full web format means that both users and bloggers win: users get to see the visual identity and unique features of the blogs they read, including comments by other users, while bloggers see their direct traffic multiply, which translates into greater user engagement and increased advertisement opportunities.

I am proud to be part of this change, and excited to see our user base grow. Surely our fellow bloggers can’t be complaining, either.

New feature: Twitter feeds

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:30:45 -0400

Greetings Feedlookers,

This blog has been quiet for a while, mainly because I’ve been busy building lots of awesome new things for Feedlooks. Among these new features is a major addition I’m glad to release to our beta server today: Integration with your Twitter feeds.

To try this experimental feature, go to “Add feed” in your Home window, and look for the Twitter button below:

After clicking on this button, a new window will be opened and redirected to Twitter.com, where you will be able to sign in and authorize Feedlooks (by “Teia Technology LLC”) to retrieve data on your behalf.

Once that authorization process is done and the new window is closed, you should be able to see your new Twitter feed, with all the tweets from users you follow.

This feature is still under development, so please don’t hesitate to drop me a line if things don’t behave as expected.

Enjoy your tweets and stay tuned for other exciting new changes coming up in the next weeks!

-Artur

Crawler back to normal

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:34:00 -0400

Hey Feedlookers,

Some of your feeds might not have been updated today between the hours of 6:30AM and 10:00AM (EST), as our crawler—the magic little program that goes around the internet asking for new content—was somehow down for reasons I am still investigating.

Everything should be back to normal now, and I will be closely monitoring the crawler’s health throughout the day.

Please do contact us via the Feedback button or the contact form under “Help” if you have any further questions.

-Artur

Feedlooks understands your language The world of character...

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:31:00 -0400

Feedlooks understands your language

The world of character encoding can be a complex one, and I am not the first (and surely not the last one) to run into the difficulties associated with interpreting and dealing with multiple encodings.

As some of you have noticed, previously Feedlooks only ‘sort of’ understood international characters. Well, for those of us who subscribe to international feeds, here is some good news: Feedlooks is now able to correctly interpret non-English characters.

Please do drop us a message if some of your feeds are still messy, and I’ll take a closer look at your case.

PS: You might notice that older items are still incorrectly encoded. Unfortunately there is no simple way to fix these, but all new items from this point forward should be fine.

New feature: Comment count! I’m increasingly moving...

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:30:00 -0400

New feature: Comment count!

I’m increasingly moving towards content-relevance issues, and the first feature I’m rolling out in this direction is “comment count”. The idea is to be able to see what posts stand out in a busy feed: next to each feed entry, you will find from zero to three little bars, corresponding to how many (user) comments that entry has gotten, in comparison to the feed average. Hot posts should have 2+ bars, unless the post is so young that users haven’t had the chance to comment on it.

Not all feeds offer this feature though. I’m starting a dialog with services like Disqus and IntenseDebate to expand the feature scope.

Stay tuned!

EDIT: I’m playing around with different possibilities for these bars, so this feature is still very experimental. The latest implementation uses the number of clicks on the post instead of comments, but it’s likely this will change soon.

The fantastic AddThis button, fresh out of the oven in...

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:45:00 -0400

The fantastic AddThis button, fresh out of the oven in Feedlooks.

You can now share and bookmark your items using literally hundreds of services, like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc, including my favorite service: e-mail! :)

Themes and faster feed loading

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:21:00 -0400

A quick update on recent developments.

I’ve changed the whole theme idea to make it more uniform. First, all buttons look more ‘modern’, with a gradient look. Second, only the Feedlooks bar can change its theme now. I believe this leads to a more consistent user experience, while allowing for different tastes.

Also, I’ve tweaked a few things here and there to make feeds load faster. It should now take only a fraction of a second to switch between folders.

I am constantly improving feed compatibility, and lots of feeds that were previously misinterpreted are now fully supported. Please let me know if you are experiencing any difficulties reading any of your feeds.

Finally, in case you haven’t noticed (that’d be hard), there’s a new prominent Feedback button next to Sign off. Sorry about its shaking and flashing, but feedback is crucial for improving the system, so please don’t be shy!

And I hope I find you cooler than us here in D.C. It’s 100F out there!

Folders, unlimited feeds, and lots of improvements

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:19:00 -0400

Great news for folks who subscribe to lots of feeds: You can now organize your feeds by folders.

It took me a while to implement this much requested feature, but I wanted to do it right. Since Feedlooks takes a different approach at presenting new items, a lot of the development time was spent simply thinking about different possibilities, both at the user-interface and the database levels.

(Tip: if you don’t care about folders, simply close the folders sidebar by clicking on the ‘Folders’ tab on the left of your Home window. Feedlooks will remember its state upon your next login).

I am also more confident on the scalability of our backend, so I am lifting the 200-feeds limit. Feel free to upload your OPML file, and please don’t hesitate to report bugs-those reports are always welcome!

There are also lots of visual and internal improvements you might notice, so feel free to play around and drop me a line with your feedback (under ‘Help > Contact Us’).

I am pretty happy with this new release, and hope you will enjoy it too.
-Artur

Feed update frequency

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 12:37:00 -0400

It seems like we’re getting yet another batch of new users, this time around due to a new review by MakeUseOf.com. Welcome aboard!

Due to a spark in feed subscriptions from our new users, some feeds might have been taking longer than the usual to get updated, perhaps 40 minutes or more.

I just wanted to let everyone know I am monitoring this increase and taking the necessary measures to keep the feed update time well under 30 minutes.

Thanks for your patience while we manage this (more than welcome) demand during our beta phase.

-Artur

PS: We are currently looking into switching to real-time feed updates through PubSubHubbub. Stay tuned for more news on this soon.

Major database upgrade. All past items reset to New.

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 19:19:48 -0400

As some of you might have noticed, Feedlooks was temporarily down this week as we upgraded our database and other behind-the-scenes components.

All your existing feeds were saved, but unfortunately we had to reset all past entries to New. We apologize for the inconvenience.

These changes will ensure Feedlooks responds well to its increased demand, and remains fast no matter how many blogs our users are subscribed to.

And as usual, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line with your feedback. (Under ‘Help > Contact Us’).

Thank you for your patience during this important beta-test phase, and stay tuned for new exciting features in the user interface front.
-Artur