I’m very proud to announce the launch of FavePersonal; a WordPress theme designed for personal websites. I have been using (and building and…
Fellow Colorado web geeks, I made you a t-shirt. The code that comprises the white stripe is a full, working HTML page with canvas code that draws…
It’s been very interesting to me to see how some folks are re-evaluating their work/life balance in the wake of reading Isaacson’s Steve…
Landed and got caught up with some friends in the Bay Area today. Looks like tomorrow will be a development day – at least half doing in person collaborative development1 with Scott as we push towards next monday’s public release of FeedLounge. Tuesday and Wednesday, we’ll be at MacWorld – hope to see y’all there.…
FeedLounge has been upgraded to alpha 7. Besides the new features (item push rocks!), this upgrade included a huge database update which caused about 24 hours of downtime. I’ve got a bit of reading to do to catch up with all my feeds.
I was very excited when it was announced that Firefox and IE will be using the same icon to allow people to subscribe to an RSS feed. This icon immediately becomes the standard “Subscribe to Feed Icon”, which is a great thing all around. Matt Brett has created some high quality versions of this icon…
Like most people who have migrated to XHTML for web development, I stopped using target=”_blank” for opening links in new windows in favor of onclick=”window.open(this.href); return false”. They accomplish the same thing (opening the link in a new window) and the second one validates. However, as I was implementing the often requested “open external links…
Today was extremely productive: a commonly requested feature for FeedLounge lots of front end work for Scott to hook up a few little elegance tweaks the adoption of the new standard “subscribe” icon (which you may have noticed on this site and feedlounge.com already) but I didn’t eat lunch until 6:30pm…
One of the features we’d planned (and built) for FeedLounge was the ability to save feed items from feeds you are subscribed to. We thought it would be a pretty cool feature, and one that Scott was particularly excited about. However, as we talked to more and more people about features they wanted in a…
FeedLounge has been updated to alpha 6, and now works in IE (Win) and Safari.
Yesterday I posted some, as it turns out, unfounded concerns about FeedBurner’s new FeedFlare features and how they would impact me as a reader of many great blog authors who use FeedBurner’s service. Thanks again to Eric and Dick from FeedBurner for helping me get the facts straight. Today, I’m putting on my feed reader…
UPDATE: FeedBurner CTO Eric Lunt was kind enough to explain to me that most of my concerns are unfounded. I should have known that they would avoid these issues. However, as a feed reader developer, I’ve got some additional follow-up thoughts for another post. FeedBurner‘s FeedFlare announcement has a lot of people excited. While I…
I’ve spent the last several days getting FeedLounge compatible with IE – not my favorite way to spend time. When we made the decision to support Firefox first, it was with the knowledge that the IE and Safari ports would have to happen – but that doesn’t make it any less painful. There were a…
There is a great conversation going on about web applications and scalability, with FeedLounge as an example. A few months back, there was a meme going around talking about how cheap it was to build a web based application/service/company compared to our recent past. While this may be the case in various instances, the scalability…
I’ve posted a big entry over on the FeedLounge blog. It explains where FeedLounge is today, why the public release has been delayed, and how and when things are moving forward.
I’ve updated all my FeedLounge Greasemonkey scripts and bookmarklets to work with the latest FeedLounge release (alpha 5). There are scripts that take the currently selected item in FeedLounge, and: post it to del.icio.us populate an e-mail create a new task in Tasks Pro™ or Tasks append a link (suitable for a link dump, like…
We’ve switched the FeedLounge database engine from MySQL to PostgreSQL.
As everyone knows, Google launched their own feed reader last week. I figured that this was coming sooner or later, but my first response was still along the lines of “ah crap”. Since I’ve been working hard on a web based feed reader of my own, I wasn’t really excited to see an 800 pound…
No matter how you think people will use software you design and build, they will always surprise you; often in interesting ways. In the case of FeedLounge, our users are generally coming over from a previous feed reader and have a feed reading routine that they’ve developed with that software. The feedback we get is…
I’d have to say that the California trip was, while tiring, definitely a success. Besides the opportunity to meet some smart and interesting people and learn quite a bit, I was able to reconnect briefly with old and dear friends. Thanks to all of you who made time to get together this week, I thoroughly…
Tomorrow night at 6:30pm, Scott and I will be hosting a little FeedLounge meetup at the Borders in Palo Alto. I’m looking forward to talking with everyone and showing off FeedLounge1. Stop by if you’re in the area. And maybe talking to a few Tasks users? [back]
Scott and I will be in the Bay Area (peninsula area mostly) next Wednesday and Thursday for a couple FeedLounge meetings. Get in touch if you’re in the area and you’d like to get together. We’re also looking at setting up in a coffee shop for an hour or two to demo the product and…
My post on the FeedLounge blog discussing contextual ads has spawned some interesting conversation in the comments. Several people feel it would be a very bad thing to put advertising in a feed reader, others don’t have an issue with it. I’m not going to try to tackle everything here, but I thought it would…
Andrew West has put up a great review of FeedLounge. I especially like the way he’s seeing what we have now and imagining how more cool stuff can be added in the future. As I did with Chris Meller’s review, I wanted to clarify a couple of minor points: Due to the ajax nature of…
I continue to get responses trickling in from last week’s FeedLounge newsletter mailing. Many of these responses include answers to our “what is a fair price for FeedLounge” question. All of the feedback is very valuable information for us to have – even the few people that responded with: I’d never pay for any online…
By request, I’ve created another Greasemonkey script for FeedLounge. This one adds an ‘E-mail’ button which takes the information from the current item and sticks it in a mailto: URL. I also created a bookmarklet version for non-Firefox users. E-mail FeedLounge Item Greasemonkey Version Bookmarklet
Chris Meller has written up a great review of FeedLounge. He does a great job explaining the way things work and I’m glad to see he thought the interface was easy to use. There are just a couple of things I wanted to follow up on from his review: If you’re on the Home page,…
Yesterday I sent out a FeedLounge newsletter to the people who had filled out the form for more information/beta test. I included a brief synopsis of what we’re doing and working on, and also offered alpha spots to the first 100 people to reply1. I somewhat underestimated the response that would get. Scott called me…