Painful “Fix”.

As feared, we’re going to have to drop the current (corrupt) cache data to fix the problems folks are seeing. As a result FeedLounge performance will suffer until the cache repopulates - likely through the weekend. We are dropping the cache now.

Alex Leaves FeedLounge.

1 week ago I sold my share of FeedLounge to Scott. We delayed the announcement until today because I was out of town until last night.

I’d like to thank Scott for all the great work he’s done to make our vision for FeedLounge come to life. Scott will continue to run the service and I’m sure he will do a great job with it.

I’d also like to thank everyone who has used, supported and provided feedback about FeedLounge. FeedLounge has been an amazing experience for me and I’d like to thank you for what I’ve learned from each of you.

I’ve posted some more personal thoughts (including reasons for leaving) on my blog. Please leave any comments you may have on that post rather than this one.

Update: 2006-08-17.

It’s been a while since we have done an update post, but I want to get back in the habit.

• TagThru to del.icio.us is working again, as FeedLounge has moved to the new HTTPS based API (forum thread)
• email validation now allows four letter domain suffixes
• The number of FastCGI processes was increased to allow for the increase in traffic to my.feedlounge.com
• Error on the signup page showing “property object” in the username and email fields
• feedlounge.com/blog and the feedlounge feeds are now working after the latest WordPress upgrade borked them (forum thread)

Update: 2006-08-22.

• Client side exception handling improved. A bad feed should not break the entire UI.
• Unread counts that are ‘off’ are now reset when a feed’s items are loaded. Happens only on a per feed basis. (forum thread)
• Minor performance enhancements on slower connections (aborting outdated AJAX requests).
• Feed update schedule is now variable between 30 minutes and 2 hours, instead of the previous 48 hours.
• Mark Page Read button layout was a bit funny in IE.
• Mark Page Read now works more than once in IE (IE’s XMLHttpRequest doesn’t support a GET URL > 1Kish) (forum thread)
• Expansion of last tag now properly expands in IE (forum thread)

FeedLounge State of the Union.

This post is a prelude to a series of posts that will outline the new and exciting plans that FeedLoungers are hatching. FeedLounge is alive and moving forward faster than before. We are currently putting the finishing touches on a list of new features and the plan to get them released to the public. We are also working on a widespread communication plan to get the word out about FeedLounge. FeedLounge continues to strive for innovation and openness with unparalleled excellence; we welcome your input along this new leg of the journey.

FeedLounge has recently undergone some personnel changes. Alex has left FeedLounge, and we wish him the best in his future endeavors. Kris joined FeedLounge as a Performance Architect and is working on some backend changes that will deliver screaming results. Matt joined FeedLounge as a Senior Developer working to deliver new high quality features that will keep FeedLoungers coming back for more. Amanda joined the team with the mission to evangelize and design the future of FeedLounge. We’ll post profiles and ideas from each of our new FeedLoungers in the upcoming weeks.

All-in-all there are exciting changes happening at FeedLounge. Stay tuned for more information.

IE7 Support.

We have posted 2 small changes out to the application today:

1. IE7 Support - Turns out that IE7 wasn’t supporting the way we were determining the client height, so we updated FeedLounge to use document.documentElement.clientHeight for IE7 user agents. IE7 and FeedLounge are now a go.
2. Flagged Items Export - Simply turn on the preference to publish your feeds to the public, and hit this URL: http://api.feedlounge.com/USERNAME/flagged. Don’t forget to use your own userid in place of USERNAME in the URL.

Time to say goodbye.

All,

Due to some overwhelming personal/family issues, it is with regret that I announce the closure of FeedLounge as of June 1st, 2007. I have been trying to develop new features and support FeedLounge in my spare time, but the toll of a new child, and a job, and now a serious injury in the family requires all of the rest of my attention. Something had to give.

All annual subscribers that are currently active will be fully refunded their pro-rated subscription after they have cancelled with PayPal. I am in contact with PayPal to attempt a mass-cancellation, but it seems that is not possible, at least with the support people I have talked with. If anyone has pointers, feel free to comment here and let me know. I will at a minimum remove the PayPal notification backchannel on June 1st.

If anyone is interested in buying and taking over FeedLounge, please contact me and we can discuss. We have also developed a FeedLounge V2 UI that is backend agnostic, using all the latest bells and whistles (YUI-ext, client side caching, etc).

Hope on the horizon.

All,

I have serious offers in right now to take FeedLounge free to the public. If the deal succeeds, FeedLounge would convert to a free service after some transition period. I will still allow all existing users to cancel their subscriptions as of June 1st, and then just re-activate them as free subscribers should the deal move forward. There would also be more serious backing that just one person can provide, so I think that would be welcomed by the user community.

Signing off…for now.

All,

FeedLounge the subscription service will be shutting down this weekend. I am still working on a deal with another party to take FeedLounge free, and things are looking up. The new FeedLounge would be on a different backend however, and will also take some time to develop, so the existing service needs to come offline anyway.

Please export your feeds/flags/tags, and we hope to see you again in the near future, without that pesky pay barrier that most people hated.

More updates as they come…

All subscriptions cancelled.

I was able to cancel everyone’s subscription today with the help of Paypal support, and after their downtime this morning…

I refunded all monthly subscribers the payment for the month of may, and refunded as many yearly subscribers as I could track down. If you are still missing a refund, it means PayPal won’t let me refund anymore. Just forward (to scott at stonecobra daht com) me the Paypal transaction number, or at a minimum your paypal email address and I will process the refund promptly.